From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
THE FIGHT FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE IN HARD TIMES
BOOK REVIEW
SPEECHES TO THE PARTY; JAMES P. CANNON, WRITINGS AND SPEECHES, 1952-54, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Cannon died in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.
In their introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question that has underscored my previous reviews which detail earlier periods in Cannon’s political career and does so here as well. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show?
The period under discussion- the early 1950’s- is essentially the swan song of his role as the central leader of the organization. Fortunately, Cannon had one last fight in him and went out swinging. However, unlike previous fights in the party he was slow to pick up the gravity of the implications of the opposition’s positions, in the party and internationally in the Fourth International, for the future revolutionary perspective. That said, Cannon did fight, if partially and belatedly, and that accrues to his merit as a revolutionary. Revolutionaries too get old and tired and do not always live in revolutionary times so they can show what they are made of. I will repeat here what I have mentioned in earlier reviews. One thing is sure- in his prime- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
Let’s face it, the post-World War II period, after an initial outburst of class struggle, was not a good time for revolutionaries in America. As a victor America became the dominate economic and military power in the world. That coupled with an out and out ‘red scare’ witch hunt backed by most elements of the ruling class forced revolutionaries to duck their heads and hope for better days. This is the background to the fight which Cannon led against those who wanted to negate the role of the revolutionary party or to liquidate its public tasks.
No political person wants to be isolated from the arena of their work and that applies to revolutionaries as well. Feeling irrelevant has the same effect. Those conditions inevitably lead a revolutionary party inward. Cannon, having experienced about every trial and tribulation a revolutionary could face in a bourgeois democracy, actually felt the fight coming. Cannon stated he had put a question mark over the party’s existence as a revolutionary organization in 1952. He believed that he might have to start over with the youth out in Los Angeles (where he was living at the time). Given that prospect, Cannon, as they say, got his Irish up.
As to the particulars of the fight, known in radical history as the Cochran-Clark fight, there were two trends. The main one represented by Cochran, a leading party trade unionist in the automobile industry, under the pressure of the witch hunt essentially wanted to reduce the organization down to a propaganda circle and liquidate any revolutionary perspective. The other represented by Clark ,which also was reflected internationally in the Fourth International, was to orient to the Stalinist milieu essentially refurbishing the credentials of the American Communist Party in light of Stalin’s death and revolutionary developments in Eastern Europe. This was a different form of liquidation of the revolutionary perspective which the Socialist Workers Party had fought over the, at that time, 25 year history of its fight against Stalinism.
An interesting note about this faction fight is that unlike most such fights in leftist organizations the key elements of the opposition here are the party trade unionists. Usually it is the volatile petty bourgeois elements that develop political differences when times get tough or when the petty bourgeois milieu turns hostile, for example, in 1939 with the Hitler-Stalin Pact which was the immediate prelude to World War II. Party trade unionists, reflecting immediate practical pressures historically tend to be the right wing of revolutionary parties-but they stay in the party. For revolutionaries, this trend is sometimes frustratingly so, as occurred in the American Communist Party in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact mentioned above. Thus, mark it down that a revolutionary party is in trouble when the trade unionists begin to balk. In any case, Cannon was able to pull the majority of the trade unionists back. While the future developments of the party in the 1960’s and 1970’s, after Cannon left the day to day operations, might make one wish that he did take those youth out in California and start over this writer is glad that he fought this fight. Thanks- James P. Cannon.
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
So what was his true stature? Whilst he never met Marx, Bax was a friend and constant companion of Engels (p. 29), who regarded him as being among the few in England who ever understood their ideas. He was ‘the only Socialist of his generation in England to have had direct contact with Hegelian philosophy’ (p. 21), and ‘was almost alone in taking seriously the question of the relationship of philosophy and Marxism’ (p. 49), an excellent discussion of which occupies pages 55–8 of this book. Bax was the only British Marxist for many a day to see the importance of spreading the understanding of philosophy outside the lecture room, and produced two textbooks for the Philosophical Library of Bohn’s, the equivalent at the time of the serious mass paperback publisher. He wrote four superb studies of German history, some of which have been republished recently (though not in England), and an equal number on the French Revolution. It was he who persuaded Morris to join the Democratic Federation (p. 27), and left along with him to found the Socialist League, which they tried to persuade to ‘adopt a policy which could be the basis for an independent working-class party’ (p. 28), in other words, pioneering the development of the British labour movement. And in spite of the mythology which tries to make Rosa Luxemburg the main opponent of the revisionism of Bernstein and Kautsky (cf. Workers Press, 4 December 1993), it was Bax who first showed that they shared so much common ground. He pointed out that whereas ‘Bernstein’s reformulation of Marxism would not only seriously weaken German Social Democracy but would at the same time create damaging divisions within the International as a whole’ (p. 106), Kautsky had a ‘linear view of human progress’ which owed more to Darwin than Marx (p. 108, cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 64). Bax hailed the heroism of the Spartacist revolt, and saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the first breakthrough for Socialism, ‘an epoch-making event in human history’ (p. 125), in which we see ‘for the first time in the world’s history the attempt officially made to subordinate national interests to international morality’ (p. 124).
‘More than anyone else’, John Cowley points out, Bax was ‘widely read in European Socialist literature’ (pp. 48–9), and ‘a staunch internationalist’ (p. 95), and some of his insights are quite extraordinary. Speaking in July 1888 of the opening up of Africa by imperialism, he remarked that ‘it is quite conceivable that the present stage should be prolonged in a slightly changed form even for another century’ (p. 45), as accurate a forecast of neo-colonialism as we are likely to get. Equally farsighted are his remarks on Russia published three years before the 1905 Revolution even broke out, which anticipate the theory of Permanent Revolution:
Occasionally, Morgan does refer to the opposition between the Communist efforts of the CPGB’s early days to the Stalinist policies which took over. But then he presents the former as youthful ‘idealism’, and the latter as ‘realism’. Callaghan, on the other hand, never wavers: he takes every opportunity to paint Dutt’s utter devotion to Stalin’s murder machine as if it were identical with the outlook of Lenin’s Bolshevism.
The two personalities whose lives are described projected strikingly contrasting images. Pollitt appeared as the ‘honest English workingman’, fond of a drink and a joke. Dutt, on the other hand, was the ‘brilliant intellectual’, regarding all humour with grave suspicion. Who knows if it concealed some reservations about ‘the line’? Together, these two acted for nearly four decades as instruments of the lying, murdering Soviet bureaucracy inside the British working-class movement.
Before 1914, Pollitt, a young boilermaker, participated in Syndicalist groups. He fought against the imperialist war and rallied to the October Revolution and the Communist International. Dutt, the son of an Indian doctor and a Swedish mother, moved rapidly from Indian nationalism to Socialism, and had the distinction of being expelled from Oxford University for his opposition to the imperialist slaughter.
The partnership of this unlikely duo sprang from the 1922 appointment by the Comintern of a Reorganisation Commission in the CPGB. Its task was to replace the loose combination of propaganda groups which had come together to form the CPGB with a centralised organisation, living up to the standards of the Comintern.
The Commission was born out of the Theses on the Structure of Communist Parties, adopted by the 1921 congress of the Comintern. This was the resolution on which Lenin expressed his grave doubts in his strange last speech to the Comintern in 1922. His misgivings, incoherently expressed, were that organisational considerations were coming to predominate over the aims of the movement. Typically, Callaghan does not mention these doubts, while Morgan refers only to Lenin’s remark that the resolution was ‘too Russian’ (since it had been moved by a German, Könen, this can only have been directed at Zinoviev).
For the next seven years, Dutt and Pollitt worked to clean up the CPGB’s leadership, and to establish a machine entirely ‘loyal to Moscow’, that is, to the bureaucracy which was taking control of the Soviet state. In the beginning, this enthusiasm might have been mistaken for determination to establish a revolutionary leadership. But it soon revealed its bureaucratic content.
Although Dutt married the Estonian Salme Murrik in 1924, the association seems to have begun four years earlier. So, even before the formation of the CPGB, Murrik had been a direct link between Dutt and the highest circles of the Comintern. In 1921 Dutt was set up with his own personal magazine, Labour Monthly, and his Notes of the Month thereafter reflected with startling accuracy every shift in Comintern policy.
As a leading trade unionist, Pollitt had been brought into the leadership of the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) at its formation. So his rise within the CPGB was fuelled from Moscow from the start.
These three — Salme Dutt, Palme Dutt and Pollitt — were forged into the spearhead for the Stalinisation of the nascent Communist movement in Britain, even before the process had begun. It was 1923 when Dutt first proposed that Pollitt become the General Secretary of the party. Six years later, this aim was achieved.
It would be particularly interesting to trace the real meaning of that strange interlude in 1925, when Dutt found himself using some of Trotsky’s arguments in his Notes of the Month, and writing his famously favourable review of Where is Britain Going?. Callaghan mentions this episode, but cannot explain it.
It would also be useful to investigate further the strange fact of Dutt’s exile in Brussels from 1924 to 1936. Vague references to health considerations certainly cloak his work on the West European Bureau of the Comintern. But this implies that Dutt’s role in Stalin’s Comintern must have been considerable. Callaghan gives us some useful information, too, on Dutt’s importance in the formation of the Indian Communist Party. This was also a long-range affair, since he never visited the country until 1946. In every case, Dutt’s role was to find out what Stalin wanted, and give it a ‘theoretical’ cover, complete with quotations from the works of Lenin.
The story of the switch from the opportunism of 1925–27 to the ‘Third Period’, loony-left phase is distorted by both authors. This was the chance that Dutt and Pollitt had been waiting for. Stalin’s crazy line had to be rammed down the throats of the CPGB’s membership, and they were the men for this job. Final victory for the faction was consummated in 1929.
Callaghan’s attitude to Trotsky is a powerful obstacle here. Since the very existence of a Left Opposition to Stalin, basing itself on Lenin’s ideas, runs directly counter to his fundamental thesis, he is obliged to misrepresent it whenever it appears. In particular, Trotsky and his followers have always to be shown in the guise of ‘ultra-leftism’. So he is pleased to mention the role of the Balham Group in 1928. At that time, Reg Groves and his friends were wild young sectarians, harrying the Rothstein-Inkpin-Campbell leadership of the CPGB for their caution in following the Comintern’s ultra-left turn. That is why Dutt could use them for a time against his opponents, turning on them when they had served their purpose.
What Callaghan takes care not to mention, however, is that this group had shed its ‘leftism’ long before it was expelled from the party in 1932, and became the first British followers of Trotsky. That is why Trotsky’s letter to them in that year concentrated on the issues of work in the unions and relations of Communists to the Labour Party.
Morgan describes Pollitt’s role in the ‘Left Turn’ of 1927–28. But he can’t fit it into his general stress on those occasions when Pollitt’s instinctive drive towards the ‘broad labour movement’ led him to try to soften its crazier forms of expression. Of course, when he comes to the switch of 1934 towards the renewed and far deeper opportunism of the ‘People’s Front’, and then after 1941 to support for Churchill’s war, Morgan can let himself go in showing Pollitt’s ‘finest hour’.
It is here that the most glaring weakness of both books is to be found. The key to understanding both the CPGB’s previous and its subsequent history is its response to the Moscow Trials. Only by recalling their enthusiastic welcome for every murder, and their eager retailing of every foul slander of the leaders of the October Revolution, can the gulf between Stalinism and Bolshevism be measured.
In Morgan’s book the Moscow Trials only crop up in relation to the explosion which followed Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, while Callaghan mentions them only in passing. But without the training they received in the period of 1936–39, when many of their most important recruits were made, and when their influence inside the Labour Party was at its highest, the ability of the British Stalinists to become the most treacherous liars in the labour and trade union movement can never be understood.
Morgan and Callaghan give us some of the raw material from which the story of British Stalinism can be reconstructed, and reveal the wealth of sources now available for this work. But, for all their ‘scholarship’, their prejudices prevent them from seeing what this material means.
One day, we can hope, this history will be written. Until then, the work of Brian Pearce, well over 30 years old as it is, is still the very best source for such knowledge. Let me remind readers that it includes studies of the formation of the party, its work in the General Strike, the switch to the ‘Third Period’, the coming of the ‘Popular Front’, and, absolutely essential, a detailed account of the writings of the CPGB, including Dutt and Pollitt, on the Moscow Trials. (See M. Woodhouse and B. Pearce, Essays on the History of Communism in Britain, New Park Publications, 1975.)
The failure of both Morgan and Callaghan to refer to this work — Morgan gives it a tiny mention in a minor footnote — is a clear sign of their bad faith, and their inability to carry out their proclaimed tasks.
We may well doubt whether any more would have been heard of Trotsky in the Stalinist movement without the changes in the Soviet Union that led to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, and our speaker admits to have been ‘helped, of course, by the reassessment taking place in the Soviet Union’ (p. 3). Nonetheless, he is well within his rights to remind us that already in 1968 he had rejected the more vulgar slanders that were current in other Communist parties, and had maintained that an ‘assessment of Trotsky can only be made on the basis of a Marxist assessment of his political ideas’ (p. 1). But 1968 is in itself a significant date, for it was in that year that the mass Vietnam movement led by Trotskyists of one hue or another completely bypassed the British Communist Party, leading in the following decade to the unprecedented situation of a European Communist party outnumbered on its left by a Trotskyist movement. The more advanced position taken up by the British Communist Party about Trotsky’s history had a real material basis, for slanders and gangsterism such as French Stalinism continued to employ until relatively recently simply would not work over here.
This presentation similarly allows us to measure the impact of the real material changes involved in the collapse of the Soviet Union over these last few years. Trotsky is now held to be in the right in his critique of ‘substitutionism’ in Our Political Tasks (p. 6), his attack upon Stalin’s economic policy (p. 17), and his view that the bureaucracy could move to ‘bourgeois restoration’ (p. 18, and postscript, p. 37). The contention that Trotsky wanted to spread the revolution by means of the sword is admitted to be the very reverse of the truth (p. 14), and ‘the kind of allegations which are made by a number of present Soviet writers that Stalin got his ideas for collectivisation from Trotsky are at best only partial truths’ (p. 33). Some interesting details of current publications by or about Trotsky in the former Soviet Union are given, and in this connection it is important to note that some of the speeches and letters from 1923 published in Izvestia TsK KPSS (nos. 5–7, 1990) referred to on page 14 can be consulted in their first full English translations in The International Workers Bulletin and The International Communist of David North’s ‘Fourth International’.
Johnstone’s judgement as to what is valid and what is not in Trotsky’s worldview is also influenced by the present position of the Democratic Left on the extreme right of the spectrum of the labour movement, where it persists in its pernicious policy of arguing for a system of proportional representation and a Popular Front-style alliance between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. So Trotsky ‘wrote many excellent things and certainly had right on his side’ in his critique of the ‘Third Period’ disaster in Germany that led to Hitler’s rise to power (pp. 20–3), whereas he ‘overestimated the revolutionary possibilities’ of France and Spain in 1936–37, and was ‘particularly wrong’ on the Popular Front and the nature of the Second World War (p. 23). Johnstone evidently feels he can still ignore the evidence accumulated by this magazine, amongst others, about the real activities of the Communists during the Spanish Civil War, even if one of his audience, Mick King, expresses some doubt about it in his contribution to the discussion afterwards (p. 29). It is also interesting to observe how Johnstone’s lack of any dialectical theory of the changes going on so rapidly has caught him with analyses that can only be described as half-formed:
Nor is Cliff on firmer ground when he tries to turn the analysis around and argue from the end of the process to its beginning. ‘If the regime in Eastern Europe and [the] USSR was post-capitalist and in 1989 there was a restoration of capitalism, how was the restoration achieved with such astonishing ease?’, he asks. ‘The events do not square with Trotsky’s assertion that the transition from one social order to another must be accompanied by civil war’ (p. 335). But if this argument really holds water, it is equally valid for the creation of a capitalist regime some 65 years earlier on Cliff’s own theory. Has history ever witnessed one class society change itself into another by means of a policy decision within its own state? According to him, a bureaucracy that had achieved state power without any such civil war years before now transformed itself into a new class simply by a change in domestic policy, ‘a state capitalist way out of the impasse’ (p. 13). ‘It was with the inauguration of the Five Year Plan that Stalinism was transformed from a stratum mediating between the proletariat and peasantry into a ruling class’ (p50), he writes, so that ‘by using brute force, to impose a series of ad hoc measures, it found a state capitalist way out of the crisis’ (p. 44).
All sorts of mental gymnastics are displayed in an attempt to justify this self-contradictory stance. Since Cliff holds that Stalin’s regime after 1928 was bourgeois, but that Bukharin still represented a working-class tendency, he is obliged to argue that ‘because of his new social position’ Stalin’s collectivisation and industrialisation (accompanied, need we add, by the ‘Third Period’ policy in foreign policy), was ‘far to the right’ of Bukharin’s policy of continuing the NEP (p. 51). What he must make of the class nature of the Stalinist parties abroad is anybody’s guess, for ‘we must be clear that Stalin’s ultra-leftism was qualitatively different from what is usually regarded in the Marxist movement as ultra-leftism, that is, the extremism of newly-radicalised and impatient workers who lacked training in revolutionary strategy and tactics’. ‘Stalin’s ultra-leftism’, on the other hand, ‘was a manipulation of the party and the workers by the leadership’. (p. 109) Is this the same Cliff who told his followers that with another few thousand on their section of the last miners’ demonstration they could have made a bid for power? Not much above this level are remarks such as that on page 54, where Trotsky is laughed at for calling the working class ‘still the ruling class of the country’ in 1930 ‘when real wages in Russia were cut by half’. This had, of course, already happened to them during the Civil War in the lifetime of Lenin, when on Cliff’s own admission they still were the ruling class (cf. Volume 2 of this series, pp. 158–60).
When we move on to the question of party building, we similarly see how Cliff’s failure to understand Trotsky’s theory of revolutionary entry is likewise connected with the SWP’s self-proclamation as a revolutionary party. True enough, a summary is provided of the results of this policy as practised in France, the USA, Belgium and elsewhere (pp. 211–34), but the only hint that it might also apply to Britain is the odd remark that, apart from the British delegation at the Comintern’s Second Congress, Lenin was ‘the only person to speak on the subject’ of the Communist Party’s affiliation to the Labour Party (p. 301). This is a strange omission to make, since Trotsky’s forecast that a rising tide of trade union militancy would reflect itself in a turn to the left in the Labour Party, making entry a necessity, was brilliantly confirmed in 1945. Cliff can hardly plead ignorance of the account of this in my and Sam Bornstein’s Against the Stream (p. 250, etc.), since he elsewhere quotes from the previous chapter of the same book (p. 364). In the context of France we are told that ‘if entry were not seen as a short-term tactic it must lead to opportunism’ (p. 217), leaving the reader with the impression that this statement has the status of an eternal truth. But once we understand that in France Trotsky would have preferred entry into the Communist Party, rapidly becoming the mass party of the working class, and that the Trotskyists entered the PSOP not long afterwards, this remark falls immediately into context. And nowhere does Cliff refer to Trotsky’s basic definition of what entrism is, an ‘organic place in the ranks of the united front’ where the revolutionary group is ‘too weak to claim an independent place’. Indeed, we are given several indications that Cliff does not understand the connection between entry and the united front policy at all. Speaking of Germany before the rise of Hitler, he asks himself, ‘how could 50 members of the Left Opposition in Berlin pressurise the KPD with its 34,000 members?’, as ‘the very existence of a small organisation calling for a united front seemed a contradiction in terms’ (p. 160). It might seem a contradiction in Cliff’s terms, but it was certainly not one in Trotsky’s, for in the very letter he quotes (Writings 1929, p. 337) Trotsky makes his meaning abundantly clear: ‘The Leninbund should feel and function like a faction within German Communism and not like an independent party.’ (original emphasis)
The same confusion applies to the transitional method and the founding of the Fourth International, which, as I have argued elsewhere (Workers News, October–November 1990), cannot be understood at all outside the context of the coming war. The proclamation of the International in 1938 is held to be a mistake (p306), for ‘under conditions of a massive expansion of capitalism, as took place after the Second World War’, the demands in its programme for a sliding scale of hours and wages ‘were at best meaningless, and at worst reactionary’, and ‘other demands in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, such as the establishment of “workers’ defence guards”, “workers’ militia”, and “the arming of the proletariat” certainly did not fit a non-revolutionary situation’ (p. 300). Exactly. For the Fourth International and the Transitional Programme were not founded for conditions of massive expansion of capitalism after the Second World War, but for the political crisis that would inevitably emerge towards the end of it. And dual power actually was posed at the time – in parts of Italy and France the Communist-dominated resistance actually did wield quasi-state functions until disarmed by Moscow’s directives, not to mention the civil wars that broke out in Yugoslavia and Greece during the war, or in Vietnam and China after the end of it. The fact that the Trotskyists were able to play so small a part in these events was only partly due to their tiny size, for an examination of their politics at the time shows that, like Tony Cliff, they had by then abandoned the transitional method (that is, assuming that they had ever understood it).
That brings us on to an interesting feature of this book, the light it casts on the postwar ideological confusion of the Trotskyist movement that gave rise to the Socialist Review Group, the ancestors of the modern SWP. For contrary to the legend spread by the late Gerry Healy of unblessed memory, and given credence by the majority of Trotskyists since, this group did not emerge out of a cowardly refusal to oppose the Korean War in 1950, but as a result of the inability of the Trotskyist movement to explain the expansion of Stalinist state forms in Eastern Europe after 1945. And the present book shows that Cliff still shares their logic:
Saying this, of course, does not detract from the book’s value otherwise. Whilst less detailed and less well researched than Broué’s biography, it does allow Trotsky to emerge as a political figure in a clear and coherent fashion, even if his personal fortunes tend to fade into the background a bit. It is a real contribution to the political debate about Trotsky, now that so much more material is becoming available. And the reader would have to range over a very wide field indeed to encounter the material collected together and arranged so well here.
The Socialist Party’s unhesitating opposition to the USA’s entry into the war in 1917 brought down on its head a torrent of repression, far greater than that visited on Socialists in any other country during the First World War; Britain, France, Germany and Tsarist Russia included. A total of 2,100 people were arrested and indicted for opposing the war, and over 1,000 convicted, with over 100 of them receiving prison terms of 10 years or more. Debs, the 64 year old party leader, was sentenced in 1918 to 10 years in jail, and was not released until 1921, long after the war was over. In Britain, conscientious objectors did not receive sentences exceeding two years, whilst in the USA, 17 COs were sentenced to death, 142 to life in prison, and 345 to prison terms that averaged 16 years.
The wave of state-sponsored terror that descended upon America’s Socialists in the war and the immediate postwar years, not least in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, was one major cause of the Socialist Party’s subsequent long-term near terminal decline. Another, which to my mind the author greatly underestimates, is the havoc wreaked by the rabid civil war loosed in the ranks of the battered Socialist Party by the Comintern-inspired split, which was liberally funded by Russia and often deepened by police spies, and which led to the emergence of the Communist Party of the USA.
The USA from its inception has always been a violent society, not merely at the ‘Frontier’ in the ‘West’, but also in the interior in the ‘East’ behind the lines. The interior still remains violent today, where the rates for murder and rape and the proportion of the population in prison are the highest in the world.
In much the same way, Sexton argues that the class struggle in the USA has been from the very beginning harder fought, more brutal and more violent than in Britain and Europe. In Europe, as I document in my The Labour Movement in Europe (London 1975), even at its peak the bourgeoisie never held the state power and the judiciary in its hands alone. That power had to be shared with the remnants of the landed aristocracy, the church hierarchy, and other social elements which pre-dated the bourgeoisie on the social scene.
No such dichotomy existed in the USA. There was from the very beginning no feudal aristocracy holding all the land in a kind of monopolistic seigniorial tenure, nor, since the constitution laid down that there was to be no established religion, no theological cult of any variety exercising massive social, political and propaganda power in its own right. In these circumstances, US business exercised a predominance in the making, application and interpretation of the legal code that was quite unprecedented elsewhere. ‘In the United States’, Sexton writes, ‘employers were often not merely above the law, they were the law.‘ (p. 66) Employers in the USA have all along exercised far more direct power over the President, House and Senate, the police and the judiciary in the 50-odd states than the bourgeoisie has ever exercised in Europe over comparable governmental institutions. In a nation without any BBC, with a radio and television network entirely at the mercy of commercial capitalist advertisers, in which election broadcasts are not free, but must be paid for in millions of dollars, the domination of capitalist ideology reigns quite unchallenged. Such news as appears is trivialised and biased in the extreme. National newspapers in the main do not exist. Newspaper readership is far lower than in the UK, the level of reporting is far lower, and the diversity of opinion expressed is far more closely monitored by the media monopolies in the USA than in the UK. Through most of American history, the law courts have been quite remarkably hostile to labour, with the widespread use of the injunction hog-tying labour through most of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The organisation of mass production industry in the 1930s would have quite impossible without the election of Roosevelt as President, and the subsequent enactment of the Wagner Act and the National Labour Relations Act, which briefly tipped the balance of the law in labour’s favour. The subsequent enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act tipped the balance sharply back in favour of the employers, where it still remains. In short, labour in the USA has been forced to struggle far harder than its counterparts in Europe, only in the end to gain far less. This is an original thesis, one which Sexton documents with much detail drawn from the history of the USA over the past 200 years. The data, with which I am familiar, is in the main incontrovertible. The use which Sexton makes of the material is entirely legitimate, and to myself quite convincing.
As Sexton does not fail to point out, there are, however, a number of other exceptional features which characterised the US experience. These can be briefly listed. There is the absence in the USA of any feudal aristocracy, with the consequent easy access of the masses to universal suffrage, quite without hard-fought struggles, which was close to unique. There is the open democratic character of the US constitution, with its intricate set of checks and balances between the House of Representatives, the Senate, the President and the judiciary, and its federal character, with many important powers resting with the states and not with the federal government at all. There were also the existence through most of the twentieth century of ‘free land’ on an ‘Open Frontier’ in the ‘West’, which allegedly provided a safety valve for discontented workers in the ‘East’; and the 40 million ethnically diverse emigrants who crossed the Atlantic from Europe to the USA between 1870 and 1915, and who constituted a virtual reserve army of labour pressing down on native working-class militancy; there was also the legacy of slavery, with the resultant racist attitudes which were prone to split white and black labour into discrete and hostile groups. Finally, the very vastness of the territories of the USA made it difficult or next to impossible to build up truly national forms of working-class and Socialist organisation. Such factors Sexton freely concedes to be important. Yet they remain in her view quite insufficient to provide a global explanation of the weakness of American labour.
The extent of the war on labour and the left waged by US employers against US employees is documented at great length, and the reader will need to go to the account of particular strikes and confrontations to get the full sense of the matter. A few details concerning the casualty lists will serve to make the matter plain. In the seven years of 1890–97 an estimated 92 people were killed in major strikes, and from January 1902 to September 1904 an estimated 198 people were killed and 1,966 wounded. Over the years 1877–1968 state and federal troops intervened in labour disputes, almost invariably on behalf of the employers, on more than 160 occasions. Overall, a check of strike casualties actually reported in the national press over these same years gives a total of 700 dead and thousands more injured.
More recently, violence has declined, but some 29 people were nonetheless killed in major strikes between 1947 and 1962. By comparison, if the figure quoted by Sexton is correct, in the United Kingdom only one person has been killed in a strike since 1911. The trade union movement, in proportional terms, is far stronger even now in the UK than it has ever been in the USA. But if British unions had faced the same level of employer and state oppression as their counterparts in the USA, would they be at all as strong as they are today? One very much doubts it.
It has long been customary for para-Marxoid left-wingers in the UK, to say nothing of whole rafts of alienated left-wing middle-class intellectuals in the USA, to look with contempt upon the US unions as being led by corrupt, bureaucratic, class collaborationist ‘labour lieutenants of capital’, and their members as reactionary and racist to a man. The truly kaleidoscopic variety of US labour has thus been subsumed into some stylised stereotype based on Hoffa, the Teamsters and the Mafia, which, if the truth be told, are themselves quite alien to the reality of Hoffa himself and that of the Teamsters, and even less applicable to other unions, the wider ranks of the AFL-CIO as a whole. This hackneyed notion of a bought-over ‘labour aristocracy’, led by a corrupt and self-serving class collaborationist bureaucracy, was always too simple, and always in danger of being gravely misleading. Now that The War on Labor and the Left has appeared and dealt with these matters more thoroughly, one would like to think that we will here no more of this nonsense again.
Filtzer explains why Khrushchev’s measures were largely unsuccessful, and often proved unpopular. Many of his attempts to improve ministerial efficiency led to a form of decentralisation that merely replicated the bureaucratic system at a regional level, and did not lead to an improvement in industrial and agricultural efficiency. Soviet bureaucrats resented the disruption caused by the ministerial reforms. Industry could not provide sufficient machinery to implement the expansion of agriculture, and food shortages led to price rises and working-class resistance, which, in the case of Novocherkassk, was brutally suppressed. The intelligentsia resented the expansion of further education, which was seen as a threat to its privileges. The immediate results of de-Stalinisation in Eastern Europe, most vividly expressed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, made the Soviet bureaucracy as a whole very wary, and explains why Khrushchev himself veered between liberalisation and repression.
Filtzer sees two factors behind Khrushchev’s downfall. Firstly, Soviet bureaucrats as individuals and as a social group resented the disruptive consequences of his reforms. Secondly, they recognised that the reforms had in fact led to more difficulties in industry and agriculture. This leads Filtzer on to a more profound question – the basically irreformable nature of the Soviet socio-economic system. He shows that disorganisation, material and labour shortages, waste, defective produce and poor distribution were essential features of Soviet-style ‘planning’. Furthermore, because ‘ordinary people in both town and countryside were excluded from any say in how society was to be run’, workers ‘played a large part in causing, or at least perpetuating, such disruptions’ (pp. 70–1). The perpetual labour shortage led to workers being able to defend themselves by forcing enterprise managements to accept poor discipline and shoddy work. Khrushchev was unable to overcome these problems (indeed, his reforms often exacerbated them) because they were immanent to the socio-economic formation constructed under Stalin from the late 1920s, and could not be overcome short of overturning that system, a step Khrushchev was not willing to take.
That being the case, it is strange that Filtzer, in framing his discussion of Khrushchev within a comparison with the final Soviet reformer, Gorbachev, does not investigate why, if Khrushchev and his ‘hare-brained’ schemes were thrown out, Gorbachev was allowed to carry on, despite the fact that his reforms, once they assumed a market orientation, would evidently lead to the demise of the Soviet system. Despite the problems which Khrushchev was trying to address, the Soviet economy was still expanding at the time of his dismissal by around six per cent per annum, and the Soviet bureaucracy could afford to adopt less risky policies. The bureaucracy did not have this luxury by the 1980s, when growth had practically stopped. Gorbachev’s reforms had to continue, whatever the results. The bureaucracy knew that its system had reached the end of the road, and by the late 1980s it recognised that its only hope for survival was through a return to capitalism.
Nevertheless, despite this omission, readers of this journal who are studying Soviet history, or who are teaching such courses, will find this book a good introductory and guide for further study for themselves or their students.
Certainly political analysis is not her strong point, for she believes that among ‘the dreams the Trotskyists hoped to activate’ were that ‘someone might assassinate Stalin’ (p. 86), and that Trotsky and his French supporters ‘decided to call themselves the Fourth International’ in 1933 (p. 112, a mistake repeated on pages 93 and 123). It is treated as a great revelation that when he was International Secretary Van Heijenoort used US sailors as couriers abroad (p. 189), a fact that has appeared in several books by now and has been open knowledge for many years. Quite unaware of the scope and outcome of the conflict inside the US Socialist Workers Party over the ending of the Second World War, she even takes as good coin Van Heijenoort’s alibi when leaving the movement that his first doubts about Marxism came from the flaws in Engels’ mathematics in Anti-Dühring (p. 215).
However, there are indications that this superficiality is not wholly to be blamed upon the writer, for by the time she interviewed Van Heijenoort a lifetime of mathematical logic had destroyed his grasp of the political and dialectical sort, even to the extent of his no longer understanding such kindergarten Marxist propositions as the role of the individual in history and the critique of individual terrorism. Thus, speaking of the monstrous accusations made in the Moscow Trials, Feferman notes that ‘what is most interesting in this connection is that Van faulted Trotsky and his followers for having done too little in the way of conspiracy’ (p. 142):
Gietinger operated like a detective, checking earlier trials, accounts, and the press and literature covering the events, and his story unfolds in a gripping manner as he follows different leads. But this is not fiction. He was able to see archives previously closed to researchers, and material from the murderers known only to a few people.
Having sorted out how the deeds were done, and how it was possible to avoid finding the culprits, Gietinger found that times had changed since Ertel’s drama was commissioned and produced, and that TV companies were not interested in putting out his work. He therefore sent his findings in the form of an historical essay to the respected journal of labour movement history, Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, in which it appeared in 1992 (Volume 28, nos. 3 and 4). The Decaton edition is partially rewritten and a bit shorter.
The court martial of the suspected murderers in May 1919 is described by Gietinger as ‘one of the most shamelessly untruthful trials in German legal history’ (p. 31), and whilst reading it I was reminded of the Stalker affair and the supposed ‘shoot to kill’ tactic. By not asking the right questions to the right people, by conspiring to obscure who did what, by an assortment of tricks, and in this case by getting the right judges and prosecutor, it was easy to scapegoat a few minor figures, and to let those in charge get off.
It would spoil the story if I were to name names and give the game away, so I will restrict myself to revealing that Gustav Noske gave a nod and a wink, but nothing in writing, for the murders. There is no evidence that any other leading Social Democrats were involved. One can hold against them their timidity in dealing with the military, and in particular their ignoring of popular pressure for a proper civil trial, and their failure to campaign for a new trial after the court martial had been discredited. In the postwar period, the SPD has continued this shameful policy by upholding the discredited 1919 verdict. This has prevented the true facts from coming to light, and was used in the case against Ertel.
Surely the continued interest in the personality, ideas and deeds of Luxemburg, and the attraction of her and Liebknecht, both heroic giants of the international labour movement, will lead to an English language edition of Gietinger’s book being produced. I hope that somebody will get together with him to put on his drama. It would make a great film.
The book contains much valuable documentation. Whilst in general, the various authors are sympathetic to their chosen subjects, there is little hero-worship, and always a balanced attempt to assess weaknesses as well as qualities. But since the contributors subscribe to no common analysis, the whole question of ‘alternatives to Stalinism’ broached in the book’s title is left somewhat in the air. For some contributors, it is simply a question of alternative policies that might have been adopted by Stalin – or Mao or Dubcek – had they been a little wiser, or a little more humane. For others, Stalinism seems to be implied in the whole Bolshevik enterprise, and hence we have to start again, although no one seems quite sure from where (the final essay on Gorbachev ends with the words ‘On the road again’, but Canned Heat lyrics are scarcely likely to be the source of Marxist renewal). As a result, the book can be seen as no more than a collection of useful but unprocessed raw material.
Part of the problem is the varied nature of the figures dealt with. The opening chapters, on Luxemburg and Trotsky, add little new, but they do make it clear that for these Marxists, Socialism was to be defined by the self-emancipation of the working class, and that this was the criterion by which any alleged ‘workers’ state’ was to be judged. Tito’s revolt against the Kremlin and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech are significant historical events deserving of critical appraisal, but their protagonists had scant interest in workers’ self-emancipation, as the murdered Belgrade Trotskyists and the workers of Budapest could have testified.
It is also striking that in the broad range of ‘heretics’ treated, there is not one who developed any serious analysis of Stalinist society in terms of a form of class rule. There is no Serge, no Shachtman, no James, no Djilas, no Cliff, no Kuron and Modzelewski. Apparently, some heretics are too heretical.
But if the book as a whole fails to deliver its promise, many of its parts are of considerable value. All but the most erudite will have something to learn from the essays on Thalheimer, Arthur Rosenberg, M.N. Riutin (whose anti-Stalinist document of 1932 is reproduced), M.N. Roy and Robert Havemann. Whilst at first sight Frantz Fanon might seem out of place in such a collection, Hansen and Schulz make a good case for his work as an important contribution to Socialist thinking, fashioned in opposition to the betrayals of the French Communist Party. Fanon was not a black nationalist, and he stressed the role of European allies in the Algerian liberation struggle; he rejected Russian ‘state capitalism’ as a model for Third World development, and he had interesting views on the relationship of party and class. Now that the post-cooption of Fanon as a ‘Third Worldist’ is more or less dead, it may be time to look again at this important thinker.
Jones and Mitchell attempt to make out a case for Isaac Deutscher as the most important Marxist thinker of the postwar period. Deutscher’s historical skill and his great influence on those of us who came to Trotskyism in the 1950s and 1960s are unquestionable. But although the authors are scrupulous in recognising that Deutscher grossly overestimated the progressive nature of the Soviet economy (a four-hour working day by 1984), they still fail to make their case because of certain problems shared by most of the contributors to this volume. Firstly, they claim that had Deutscher lived to see the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he might have revised his optimistic hopes in the Eastern regimes’ capacity for self-reform. But on their own evidence, he could not have done so without abandoning his entire theoretical structure. Secondly, they commend Deutscher for his opposition to Trotsky’s founding of the Fourth International. Now Deutscher may well have been right that it was the wrong time to found a democratic centralist International. But the more profound difference was between Trotsky’s persistent determination to preserve an organisation, and Deutscher’s retreat into the ‘watchtower’. In a sense, Deutscher sums up the problem with this volume – most of its subjects either tried to reform the bureaucracy from within, or criticised from without from a position of isolation. Neither offers a way forward for Socialists today.
This book certainly has merits. It makes use of the most up-to-date material released from the Russian archives, and gives extensive coverage to two relatively neglected periods of Bukharin’s life, his early years and the last years of his life.
The coverage of the formative period of Bukharin’s political career is useful in filling gaps in our knowledge of his activity in Moscow. In addition, there is a valuable analysis of the influence on Bukharin of Alexander Bogdanov, the empirio-monist philosopher, and of David Riazanov, the Marx expert who has not been noted till now as having played such a role with Bukharin. The emphasis in the book on Bukharin’s philosophy is a valuable corrective to Cohen’s biography, which dismisses his philosophy as unimportant.
Bukharin’s later years have also been often overlooked, for an obvious reason. During that time the weight of Stalinist repression meant that Bukharin was not able to speak freely, and therefore much of what he said and wrote cannot be treated as a true expression of the man. However, Hedeler and Stoljarowa are able to tease out developments in his later thinking on philosophy and culture, as well as giving a comprehensive account of the circumstances leading up to his trial and execution in 1938.
Nevertheless, the treatment of Bukharin’s life and work is altogether too disengaged. This is meant in a double sense: disengaged from its social context, and disengaged from political debate. There is no sense of the fantastic twists and turns in events – revolution, civil war, the New Economic Policy, collectivisation and so on, which moulded Bukharin, and which, through his activity, moulded leading circles of the party.
It is true to say that in the book Bukharin’s enthusiastic and yet mistaken belief in the compatibility of the market and Socialist society is treated with mild sympathy, but this is the closest we get to a sense of the current debates. Now, objectivity and clear-thinking analysis are, of course, desirable things. But unless there is a sense of direction or purpose in a work, it remains dry and lifeless. A sign of this in the book is the fact that the selection of material seems to have been an arbitrary process without a firm rationale.
On the cover of the book Hedeler and Stoljarowa write that they wish to rescue Bukharin ‘from the warehouse of the revolutionary museum’ into which he has recently been returned after his brief airing in the late 1980s. I agree. But after reading this book, it is not clear why he should be rescued.
The two authors come from the East German historical tradition. It may be the case that they represent a current of academic writers and historians who are seeking a new revolutionary politics in the post-unified Germany. If so, such politics will not come from simply noting what Bukharin has to say, but from a sharp analysis. Socialists today should be highly critical of his 1920s writings on the market, whilst recognising the theoretical contribution he made to understanding modern capitalism.
This may be a contentious polemical point. But as Bukharin was someone who grew up in the Bolshevik tradition, and who, however erroneous his subsequent path, died believing in it, such a polemic is the least he would have expected and deserved.
Certainly American scholarship about James neglects quite markedly the influence of the thought of the non-Trotskyist left that had already brought him into conflict with the International Secretariat by 1936. The originality of World Revolution, for example, is put down to the fact that he ‘came to the Trotskyist movement very much as an independent thinker, with a substantial store of previous knowledge and insights’ (p. 3), as opposed to the evidence of the internal documents of the time, which show that he was already influenced by the ideas of Boris Souvarine, Henri Chazé, Hugo Oehler, Albert Weisbord, etc. For example, without an acquaintance with the theories of the Union Communiste led by Chazé (Gaston Davoust), it would be impossible to understand why James accepted a ‘state capitalist’ theory of the degeneration of the Soviet Union during the split of 1939–40, as opposed to Max Shachtman’s ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ (p. 7). For we are repeatedly told that James went to the United States ‘for a lecture tour’ (p. 212) ‘at least in part to organise the Trotskyists’ work among African Americans’ (p. 219), which is only partly true, for it is quite plain that he was encouraged to go to remove him as an opponent of the leadership of the newly-united British section of the Fourth International, with whom he had been in political conflict since 1935, and that this was a Comintern-style exercise in ‘straightening him out’ (cf. Harry Wicks, Keeping My Head, pp. 181–2; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International, p. 24). His supporters among the British Trotskyists, such as Bill Duncan and Harry Wicks, resented it for years afterwards.
This failure to identify important factors in James’ development may lie in the general lack of grasp of the intricacies of Trotskyist history, which (apart from the treatment in Charlie Van Gelderen’s excellent contribution) is the weakest part of the book. James’ ‘confident assumption that “Pablo has captured Cannon politically” proved to be short sighted’, notes LeBlanc (p. 14), whose own hindsight obviously does not extend as far as Cannon’s cult of Castro’s Cuba. We do not need to look too far for the reasons for this, for when LeBlanc cites his sources for the history of the Trotskyist movement (p. 28, n4) they turn out to be exclusively runners from the stable of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the sole exception being Robert J. Alexander’s book, which is heavily dependent upon the information they provided for him.
But don’t let this put you off this superb book: buy one yourself, and another for a friend.
BOOK REVIEW
SPEECHES TO THE PARTY; JAMES P. CANNON, WRITINGS AND SPEECHES, 1952-54, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Cannon died in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.
In their introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question that has underscored my previous reviews which detail earlier periods in Cannon’s political career and does so here as well. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show?
The period under discussion- the early 1950’s- is essentially the swan song of his role as the central leader of the organization. Fortunately, Cannon had one last fight in him and went out swinging. However, unlike previous fights in the party he was slow to pick up the gravity of the implications of the opposition’s positions, in the party and internationally in the Fourth International, for the future revolutionary perspective. That said, Cannon did fight, if partially and belatedly, and that accrues to his merit as a revolutionary. Revolutionaries too get old and tired and do not always live in revolutionary times so they can show what they are made of. I will repeat here what I have mentioned in earlier reviews. One thing is sure- in his prime- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
Let’s face it, the post-World War II period, after an initial outburst of class struggle, was not a good time for revolutionaries in America. As a victor America became the dominate economic and military power in the world. That coupled with an out and out ‘red scare’ witch hunt backed by most elements of the ruling class forced revolutionaries to duck their heads and hope for better days. This is the background to the fight which Cannon led against those who wanted to negate the role of the revolutionary party or to liquidate its public tasks.
No political person wants to be isolated from the arena of their work and that applies to revolutionaries as well. Feeling irrelevant has the same effect. Those conditions inevitably lead a revolutionary party inward. Cannon, having experienced about every trial and tribulation a revolutionary could face in a bourgeois democracy, actually felt the fight coming. Cannon stated he had put a question mark over the party’s existence as a revolutionary organization in 1952. He believed that he might have to start over with the youth out in Los Angeles (where he was living at the time). Given that prospect, Cannon, as they say, got his Irish up.
As to the particulars of the fight, known in radical history as the Cochran-Clark fight, there were two trends. The main one represented by Cochran, a leading party trade unionist in the automobile industry, under the pressure of the witch hunt essentially wanted to reduce the organization down to a propaganda circle and liquidate any revolutionary perspective. The other represented by Clark ,which also was reflected internationally in the Fourth International, was to orient to the Stalinist milieu essentially refurbishing the credentials of the American Communist Party in light of Stalin’s death and revolutionary developments in Eastern Europe. This was a different form of liquidation of the revolutionary perspective which the Socialist Workers Party had fought over the, at that time, 25 year history of its fight against Stalinism.
An interesting note about this faction fight is that unlike most such fights in leftist organizations the key elements of the opposition here are the party trade unionists. Usually it is the volatile petty bourgeois elements that develop political differences when times get tough or when the petty bourgeois milieu turns hostile, for example, in 1939 with the Hitler-Stalin Pact which was the immediate prelude to World War II. Party trade unionists, reflecting immediate practical pressures historically tend to be the right wing of revolutionary parties-but they stay in the party. For revolutionaries, this trend is sometimes frustratingly so, as occurred in the American Communist Party in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact mentioned above. Thus, mark it down that a revolutionary party is in trouble when the trade unionists begin to balk. In any case, Cannon was able to pull the majority of the trade unionists back. While the future developments of the party in the 1960’s and 1970’s, after Cannon left the day to day operations, might make one wish that he did take those youth out in California and start over this writer is glad that he fought this fight. Thanks- James P. Cannon.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
Review
The Victorian Encounter with Marx
John Cowley
The Victorian Encounter with Marx: A Study of Ernest Belfort Bax
British Academic Press, London 1992, pp. 164, £34.50
The Victorian Encounter with Marx: A Study of Ernest Belfort Bax
British Academic Press, London 1992, pp. 164, £34.50
WHEN Belfort Bax died in the year of the general strike, there was a striking contrast between his small obituary in the Communist Party’s newspaper, and the large one for Leonid Krasin, who had been a functionary in the Soviet embassy in London. His memory has continued to be neglected ever since, a classic example being EP Thompson, who even the author of this book admits ‘tends to push Bax to one side in his concern to round out the political life of Morris’ (p. 37). Radical Chains alone of all left-wing journals published in England in the last few years has seen fit to mention his name, and only one previous research dissertation, Keith Roker’s pioneering work written nearly 20 years ago, has attempted to deal with him. And as far as I am aware this is the first review of this book to have appeared in any British Marxist magazine. The animus against Bax is even reflected in this otherwise sympathetic treatment, which describes him as ‘most conventionally Victorian in his personal and family life’ (p. 1), and ‘very much a Victorian’ (p. 73), while providing a host of petty details about his private affairs in an attempt to account for his hostility towards upper-class feminism (pp. 68–74).
Yet the rest of the book provides information that is flatly contradictory. Bax’s constant war against ‘bourgeois Philistinism’ (p. 30), his disdain for the bourgeois family, and his close friendship with and support for Havelock Ellis are all carefully catalogued, apart from the fact that we have Engels’ word for it that he had ‘a largeness of view that is but too scarce here among the sectarians calling themselves Socialists’ (p. 39).So what was his true stature? Whilst he never met Marx, Bax was a friend and constant companion of Engels (p. 29), who regarded him as being among the few in England who ever understood their ideas. He was ‘the only Socialist of his generation in England to have had direct contact with Hegelian philosophy’ (p. 21), and ‘was almost alone in taking seriously the question of the relationship of philosophy and Marxism’ (p. 49), an excellent discussion of which occupies pages 55–8 of this book. Bax was the only British Marxist for many a day to see the importance of spreading the understanding of philosophy outside the lecture room, and produced two textbooks for the Philosophical Library of Bohn’s, the equivalent at the time of the serious mass paperback publisher. He wrote four superb studies of German history, some of which have been republished recently (though not in England), and an equal number on the French Revolution. It was he who persuaded Morris to join the Democratic Federation (p. 27), and left along with him to found the Socialist League, which they tried to persuade to ‘adopt a policy which could be the basis for an independent working-class party’ (p. 28), in other words, pioneering the development of the British labour movement. And in spite of the mythology which tries to make Rosa Luxemburg the main opponent of the revisionism of Bernstein and Kautsky (cf. Workers Press, 4 December 1993), it was Bax who first showed that they shared so much common ground. He pointed out that whereas ‘Bernstein’s reformulation of Marxism would not only seriously weaken German Social Democracy but would at the same time create damaging divisions within the International as a whole’ (p. 106), Kautsky had a ‘linear view of human progress’ which owed more to Darwin than Marx (p. 108, cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 64). Bax hailed the heroism of the Spartacist revolt, and saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the first breakthrough for Socialism, ‘an epoch-making event in human history’ (p. 125), in which we see ‘for the first time in the world’s history the attempt officially made to subordinate national interests to international morality’ (p. 124).
‘More than anyone else’, John Cowley points out, Bax was ‘widely read in European Socialist literature’ (pp. 48–9), and ‘a staunch internationalist’ (p. 95), and some of his insights are quite extraordinary. Speaking in July 1888 of the opening up of Africa by imperialism, he remarked that ‘it is quite conceivable that the present stage should be prolonged in a slightly changed form even for another century’ (p. 45), as accurate a forecast of neo-colonialism as we are likely to get. Equally farsighted are his remarks on Russia published three years before the 1905 Revolution even broke out, which anticipate the theory of Permanent Revolution:
Where but yesterday medieval methods of industrial production prevailed, today we see the great industry in its rankest growth. The same with the intellectual side of things. The most advanced thought of Western Europe subsists there side by side with the most archaic superstition … These latter may then easily take the lead in progress (start a new development of their own) while their superiors of yesterday fall into the background. (p. 101)
Already in his own day Bax had experienced the fate of those who are too far ahead of their time. As Victor Adler pointed out, ‘his reputation was soon greater on the Continent than in Britain’ (p. 53). So why has Bax suffered such obvious neglect ever since? One reason is that although he opposed the First World War to begin with, by December 1914 he had come round to supporting it, not on the basis of the vulgar chauvinism of H.M. Hyndman, but as a result of his previous studies of German history, which had imbued him with a profound distaste for Prussian militarism. But the main reasons must surely be because he was anything but a little Englander, and because of his opposition to reformism and bourgeois feminism. At a time when a third of working-class men still did not have the vote, ‘extending the suffrage to women on the basis of a property qualification was seen as an anti-Socialist measure and one favouring the propertied classes’ (p. 82), and when we study the mainstream feminist propaganda of the time, with its images of voteless ladies with degrees and drunken or unemployed men with the vote, we see how easily it fits the Victorian image of the undeserving poor. The feminist movement was ‘middle-class both in composition and aims’ (p. 86), and ‘seems to entirely obliterate the usual class and party landmarks’, an ‘attempt to identify the object of the two movements by equating women with the proletariat, [which] simply overlooked the fact that there were “exploiting women and exploited women”’ (p. 85). And he saw it as ‘an integral part of the general reformist current’ (p. 83), even though Labour’s notorious yuppie lady front bench was still a century in the future. He also, incidentally, drew attention to the careerist undertones that were already present in it, but this is tastefully omitted from this account.
Bax was obviously wrong to oppose the extension of the franchise to anyone, since the working class cannot come to power unless it takes up the legitimate grievances of all other sections of society, thereby proving its fitness to wield power over society as a whole. But even his historic mistakes show a breadth of vision and a depth of insight. This is why this book’s attempt to regard Bax mainly as an insular phenomenon, a Victorian figure standing in the usual line of English left-wing saints such as Winstanley, the Diggers, Owen, Paine, etc. (p. 130), is well wide of the mark. Bax’s ideas were more Germanic than English, and he was more highly regarded at the conferences of the Second International than he was in Britain. But it is to the credit of the author that in spite of the blinkers through which New Left and Stalinist-inspired official Labour History looks at our Marxist past, his honesty and fidelity to his subject allow a very different picture to show through. I warmly recommend this well considered book.
Al Richardson
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Review
Dutt and Pollitt
John Callaghan,
Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism,
Lawrence and Wishart, London 1993, pp. 304, £19.99
Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism,
Lawrence and Wishart, London 1993, pp. 304, £19.99
Kevin Morgan,
Harry Pollitt,
Manchester University Press, Manchester 1993, pp. 210, £40.00
Harry Pollitt,
Manchester University Press, Manchester 1993, pp. 210, £40.00
NOW that Stalinism is being flushed down the historical pan, it is important that we carefully assess the history of its devastation of the workers’ movement. These two books demonstrate how the job should not be done.
Despite the many differences between their points of view, they have an essential unity of purpose. Each of their authors has examined the vast amounts of paper left behind by his subject, as well as the Communist Party archive material now available. Together, they give us a lot of useful information about their lives and work. But, beneath this scholarly load, a false conception is smuggled in. It is that the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain is a single whole, the direct contrary of the true story: the derailment of the struggle to establish a Communist leadership, and the substitution of a Stalinist monstrosity.Occasionally, Morgan does refer to the opposition between the Communist efforts of the CPGB’s early days to the Stalinist policies which took over. But then he presents the former as youthful ‘idealism’, and the latter as ‘realism’. Callaghan, on the other hand, never wavers: he takes every opportunity to paint Dutt’s utter devotion to Stalin’s murder machine as if it were identical with the outlook of Lenin’s Bolshevism.
The two personalities whose lives are described projected strikingly contrasting images. Pollitt appeared as the ‘honest English workingman’, fond of a drink and a joke. Dutt, on the other hand, was the ‘brilliant intellectual’, regarding all humour with grave suspicion. Who knows if it concealed some reservations about ‘the line’? Together, these two acted for nearly four decades as instruments of the lying, murdering Soviet bureaucracy inside the British working-class movement.
Before 1914, Pollitt, a young boilermaker, participated in Syndicalist groups. He fought against the imperialist war and rallied to the October Revolution and the Communist International. Dutt, the son of an Indian doctor and a Swedish mother, moved rapidly from Indian nationalism to Socialism, and had the distinction of being expelled from Oxford University for his opposition to the imperialist slaughter.
The partnership of this unlikely duo sprang from the 1922 appointment by the Comintern of a Reorganisation Commission in the CPGB. Its task was to replace the loose combination of propaganda groups which had come together to form the CPGB with a centralised organisation, living up to the standards of the Comintern.
The Commission was born out of the Theses on the Structure of Communist Parties, adopted by the 1921 congress of the Comintern. This was the resolution on which Lenin expressed his grave doubts in his strange last speech to the Comintern in 1922. His misgivings, incoherently expressed, were that organisational considerations were coming to predominate over the aims of the movement. Typically, Callaghan does not mention these doubts, while Morgan refers only to Lenin’s remark that the resolution was ‘too Russian’ (since it had been moved by a German, Könen, this can only have been directed at Zinoviev).
For the next seven years, Dutt and Pollitt worked to clean up the CPGB’s leadership, and to establish a machine entirely ‘loyal to Moscow’, that is, to the bureaucracy which was taking control of the Soviet state. In the beginning, this enthusiasm might have been mistaken for determination to establish a revolutionary leadership. But it soon revealed its bureaucratic content.
Although Dutt married the Estonian Salme Murrik in 1924, the association seems to have begun four years earlier. So, even before the formation of the CPGB, Murrik had been a direct link between Dutt and the highest circles of the Comintern. In 1921 Dutt was set up with his own personal magazine, Labour Monthly, and his Notes of the Month thereafter reflected with startling accuracy every shift in Comintern policy.
As a leading trade unionist, Pollitt had been brought into the leadership of the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) at its formation. So his rise within the CPGB was fuelled from Moscow from the start.
These three — Salme Dutt, Palme Dutt and Pollitt — were forged into the spearhead for the Stalinisation of the nascent Communist movement in Britain, even before the process had begun. It was 1923 when Dutt first proposed that Pollitt become the General Secretary of the party. Six years later, this aim was achieved.
It would be particularly interesting to trace the real meaning of that strange interlude in 1925, when Dutt found himself using some of Trotsky’s arguments in his Notes of the Month, and writing his famously favourable review of Where is Britain Going?. Callaghan mentions this episode, but cannot explain it.
It would also be useful to investigate further the strange fact of Dutt’s exile in Brussels from 1924 to 1936. Vague references to health considerations certainly cloak his work on the West European Bureau of the Comintern. But this implies that Dutt’s role in Stalin’s Comintern must have been considerable. Callaghan gives us some useful information, too, on Dutt’s importance in the formation of the Indian Communist Party. This was also a long-range affair, since he never visited the country until 1946. In every case, Dutt’s role was to find out what Stalin wanted, and give it a ‘theoretical’ cover, complete with quotations from the works of Lenin.
The story of the switch from the opportunism of 1925–27 to the ‘Third Period’, loony-left phase is distorted by both authors. This was the chance that Dutt and Pollitt had been waiting for. Stalin’s crazy line had to be rammed down the throats of the CPGB’s membership, and they were the men for this job. Final victory for the faction was consummated in 1929.
Callaghan’s attitude to Trotsky is a powerful obstacle here. Since the very existence of a Left Opposition to Stalin, basing itself on Lenin’s ideas, runs directly counter to his fundamental thesis, he is obliged to misrepresent it whenever it appears. In particular, Trotsky and his followers have always to be shown in the guise of ‘ultra-leftism’. So he is pleased to mention the role of the Balham Group in 1928. At that time, Reg Groves and his friends were wild young sectarians, harrying the Rothstein-Inkpin-Campbell leadership of the CPGB for their caution in following the Comintern’s ultra-left turn. That is why Dutt could use them for a time against his opponents, turning on them when they had served their purpose.
What Callaghan takes care not to mention, however, is that this group had shed its ‘leftism’ long before it was expelled from the party in 1932, and became the first British followers of Trotsky. That is why Trotsky’s letter to them in that year concentrated on the issues of work in the unions and relations of Communists to the Labour Party.
Morgan describes Pollitt’s role in the ‘Left Turn’ of 1927–28. But he can’t fit it into his general stress on those occasions when Pollitt’s instinctive drive towards the ‘broad labour movement’ led him to try to soften its crazier forms of expression. Of course, when he comes to the switch of 1934 towards the renewed and far deeper opportunism of the ‘People’s Front’, and then after 1941 to support for Churchill’s war, Morgan can let himself go in showing Pollitt’s ‘finest hour’.
It is here that the most glaring weakness of both books is to be found. The key to understanding both the CPGB’s previous and its subsequent history is its response to the Moscow Trials. Only by recalling their enthusiastic welcome for every murder, and their eager retailing of every foul slander of the leaders of the October Revolution, can the gulf between Stalinism and Bolshevism be measured.
In Morgan’s book the Moscow Trials only crop up in relation to the explosion which followed Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, while Callaghan mentions them only in passing. But without the training they received in the period of 1936–39, when many of their most important recruits were made, and when their influence inside the Labour Party was at its highest, the ability of the British Stalinists to become the most treacherous liars in the labour and trade union movement can never be understood.
Morgan and Callaghan give us some of the raw material from which the story of British Stalinism can be reconstructed, and reveal the wealth of sources now available for this work. But, for all their ‘scholarship’, their prejudices prevent them from seeing what this material means.
One day, we can hope, this history will be written. Until then, the work of Brian Pearce, well over 30 years old as it is, is still the very best source for such knowledge. Let me remind readers that it includes studies of the formation of the party, its work in the General Strike, the switch to the ‘Third Period’, the coming of the ‘Popular Front’, and, absolutely essential, a detailed account of the writings of the CPGB, including Dutt and Pollitt, on the Moscow Trials. (See M. Woodhouse and B. Pearce, Essays on the History of Communism in Britain, New Park Publications, 1975.)
The failure of both Morgan and Callaghan to refer to this work — Morgan gives it a tiny mention in a minor footnote — is a clear sign of their bad faith, and their inability to carry out their proclaimed tasks.
Cyril Smith
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Review
Trotsky
Monty Johnstone
Trotsky Reassessed
Our History Pamphlet no. 87, Socialist History Society, London 1992, pp. 37, £2.50
Trotsky Reassessed
Our History Pamphlet no. 87, Socialist History Society, London 1992, pp. 37, £2.50
Tony Cliff,
Trotsky: The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Star,
Bookmarks, London 1993, pp. 427, £6.95
Trotsky: The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Star,
Bookmarks, London 1993, pp. 427, £6.95
DEALING with world historic figures often induces the writer to create a mirror of himself and the problems he faces in his own age, and those who concern themselves with Leon Trotsky are especially susceptible to it.
Our first item is the text of a lecture delivered in May 1991, and when we compare it with the speaker’s previous essays in Cogito and Marxism Today it is fascinating to see the light it throws on the changing needs of the Communist Party and its successor, the Democratic Left, over a quarter of a century.We may well doubt whether any more would have been heard of Trotsky in the Stalinist movement without the changes in the Soviet Union that led to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, and our speaker admits to have been ‘helped, of course, by the reassessment taking place in the Soviet Union’ (p. 3). Nonetheless, he is well within his rights to remind us that already in 1968 he had rejected the more vulgar slanders that were current in other Communist parties, and had maintained that an ‘assessment of Trotsky can only be made on the basis of a Marxist assessment of his political ideas’ (p. 1). But 1968 is in itself a significant date, for it was in that year that the mass Vietnam movement led by Trotskyists of one hue or another completely bypassed the British Communist Party, leading in the following decade to the unprecedented situation of a European Communist party outnumbered on its left by a Trotskyist movement. The more advanced position taken up by the British Communist Party about Trotsky’s history had a real material basis, for slanders and gangsterism such as French Stalinism continued to employ until relatively recently simply would not work over here.
This presentation similarly allows us to measure the impact of the real material changes involved in the collapse of the Soviet Union over these last few years. Trotsky is now held to be in the right in his critique of ‘substitutionism’ in Our Political Tasks (p. 6), his attack upon Stalin’s economic policy (p. 17), and his view that the bureaucracy could move to ‘bourgeois restoration’ (p. 18, and postscript, p. 37). The contention that Trotsky wanted to spread the revolution by means of the sword is admitted to be the very reverse of the truth (p. 14), and ‘the kind of allegations which are made by a number of present Soviet writers that Stalin got his ideas for collectivisation from Trotsky are at best only partial truths’ (p. 33). Some interesting details of current publications by or about Trotsky in the former Soviet Union are given, and in this connection it is important to note that some of the speeches and letters from 1923 published in Izvestia TsK KPSS (nos. 5–7, 1990) referred to on page 14 can be consulted in their first full English translations in The International Workers Bulletin and The International Communist of David North’s ‘Fourth International’.
Johnstone’s judgement as to what is valid and what is not in Trotsky’s worldview is also influenced by the present position of the Democratic Left on the extreme right of the spectrum of the labour movement, where it persists in its pernicious policy of arguing for a system of proportional representation and a Popular Front-style alliance between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. So Trotsky ‘wrote many excellent things and certainly had right on his side’ in his critique of the ‘Third Period’ disaster in Germany that led to Hitler’s rise to power (pp. 20–3), whereas he ‘overestimated the revolutionary possibilities’ of France and Spain in 1936–37, and was ‘particularly wrong’ on the Popular Front and the nature of the Second World War (p. 23). Johnstone evidently feels he can still ignore the evidence accumulated by this magazine, amongst others, about the real activities of the Communists during the Spanish Civil War, even if one of his audience, Mick King, expresses some doubt about it in his contribution to the discussion afterwards (p. 29). It is also interesting to observe how Johnstone’s lack of any dialectical theory of the changes going on so rapidly has caught him with analyses that can only be described as half-formed:
The Russian proletariat could seize power, he [Trotsky] argued, but, without the direct state support of the European proletariat, the Soviet state could not maintain itself for any length of time in an imperialist environment. History has confirmed the former but refuted the latter proposition. (p. 15)
And some Stalinist myths persist unaltered. In spite of the fact that the Provisional Government was set up, not by any bourgeois democratic assembly, but by the ex-Tsarist Duma, February 1917 is described as ‘a successful bourgeois democratic revolution’ (p. 9), and Johnstone still prefers the peculiar formulation of ‘a deformed form of Socialism’ to Trotsky’s deformed workers’ state (p16). At one point, in the mistaken belief that he is taking Trotsky to task, he even argues against Marx’s contention that every revolution serves to perfect the state apparatus (p. 19).
Since a bit more of the truth is always better than less of it, this pamphlet is certainly to be welcomed, even if in the end it does tell us rather more about the Democratic Left than it does about Leon Trotsky.
The main beneficiary of the collapse of the Communist Party on the left is the Socialist Workers Party, and since barely a month goes by without a favourable reference to the Communist Party’s History Group in one or other of its magazines, it is plain in what direction its ambitions lie. And whilst it would be quite wrong to suggest that the SWP is involved in anything like the scale of Stalinism’s monstrous distortions, it shares the same assumption that history must be tightly harnessed to current factional concerns. Our second item, the fourth and final volume of Tony Cliff’s biography of Trotsky, shows us a number of clear examples.
Let us begin, as Cliff does, with the theory of state capitalism. Fulsome praise is heaped upon The Revolution Betrayed (pp. 16–7) without informing us that its preface sets the framework of its analysis by reminding us of Lenin’s definition of a workers’ state as ‘a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie’, making the whole argument about whether Russia is a capitalist state or a workers’ state redundant and undialectical. ‘It is necessary to defend the spirit of Trotskyism while rejecting some of his words’ (p. 338), Cliff informs us, for Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism as a degenerated workers’ state was ‘a conservative attachment to formalism’ (p. 329), and ‘with hindsight this development is far clearer to us than to those who participated in the events’ (p. 14). Much is made of Trotsky’s frequent adjustments to his analyses of Thermidor and Bonapartism during the period of forced collectivisation and industrialisation (pp. 61–7), in which he was ‘repeatedly disorientated and wrong-footed’, and this is held to be a major contribution to the ideological disintegration of the Left Opposition in the face of Stalin’s terror. This may well be the case, but whether it is due to Trotsky’s failure to adopt Tony Cliff’s more far-sighted analysis may well be doubted, for oppositional tendencies that had adopted this theory both inside and outside the USSR (Bordiga, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Korsch, etc.) fared no better, apart from the fact that a Marxist analysis of the regime’s degeneration which is being elaborated in the course of a living struggle against it of necessity has to be a changing one.Nor is Cliff on firmer ground when he tries to turn the analysis around and argue from the end of the process to its beginning. ‘If the regime in Eastern Europe and [the] USSR was post-capitalist and in 1989 there was a restoration of capitalism, how was the restoration achieved with such astonishing ease?’, he asks. ‘The events do not square with Trotsky’s assertion that the transition from one social order to another must be accompanied by civil war’ (p. 335). But if this argument really holds water, it is equally valid for the creation of a capitalist regime some 65 years earlier on Cliff’s own theory. Has history ever witnessed one class society change itself into another by means of a policy decision within its own state? According to him, a bureaucracy that had achieved state power without any such civil war years before now transformed itself into a new class simply by a change in domestic policy, ‘a state capitalist way out of the impasse’ (p. 13). ‘It was with the inauguration of the Five Year Plan that Stalinism was transformed from a stratum mediating between the proletariat and peasantry into a ruling class’ (p50), he writes, so that ‘by using brute force, to impose a series of ad hoc measures, it found a state capitalist way out of the crisis’ (p. 44).
All sorts of mental gymnastics are displayed in an attempt to justify this self-contradictory stance. Since Cliff holds that Stalin’s regime after 1928 was bourgeois, but that Bukharin still represented a working-class tendency, he is obliged to argue that ‘because of his new social position’ Stalin’s collectivisation and industrialisation (accompanied, need we add, by the ‘Third Period’ policy in foreign policy), was ‘far to the right’ of Bukharin’s policy of continuing the NEP (p. 51). What he must make of the class nature of the Stalinist parties abroad is anybody’s guess, for ‘we must be clear that Stalin’s ultra-leftism was qualitatively different from what is usually regarded in the Marxist movement as ultra-leftism, that is, the extremism of newly-radicalised and impatient workers who lacked training in revolutionary strategy and tactics’. ‘Stalin’s ultra-leftism’, on the other hand, ‘was a manipulation of the party and the workers by the leadership’. (p. 109) Is this the same Cliff who told his followers that with another few thousand on their section of the last miners’ demonstration they could have made a bid for power? Not much above this level are remarks such as that on page 54, where Trotsky is laughed at for calling the working class ‘still the ruling class of the country’ in 1930 ‘when real wages in Russia were cut by half’. This had, of course, already happened to them during the Civil War in the lifetime of Lenin, when on Cliff’s own admission they still were the ruling class (cf. Volume 2 of this series, pp. 158–60).
When we move on to the question of party building, we similarly see how Cliff’s failure to understand Trotsky’s theory of revolutionary entry is likewise connected with the SWP’s self-proclamation as a revolutionary party. True enough, a summary is provided of the results of this policy as practised in France, the USA, Belgium and elsewhere (pp. 211–34), but the only hint that it might also apply to Britain is the odd remark that, apart from the British delegation at the Comintern’s Second Congress, Lenin was ‘the only person to speak on the subject’ of the Communist Party’s affiliation to the Labour Party (p. 301). This is a strange omission to make, since Trotsky’s forecast that a rising tide of trade union militancy would reflect itself in a turn to the left in the Labour Party, making entry a necessity, was brilliantly confirmed in 1945. Cliff can hardly plead ignorance of the account of this in my and Sam Bornstein’s Against the Stream (p. 250, etc.), since he elsewhere quotes from the previous chapter of the same book (p. 364). In the context of France we are told that ‘if entry were not seen as a short-term tactic it must lead to opportunism’ (p. 217), leaving the reader with the impression that this statement has the status of an eternal truth. But once we understand that in France Trotsky would have preferred entry into the Communist Party, rapidly becoming the mass party of the working class, and that the Trotskyists entered the PSOP not long afterwards, this remark falls immediately into context. And nowhere does Cliff refer to Trotsky’s basic definition of what entrism is, an ‘organic place in the ranks of the united front’ where the revolutionary group is ‘too weak to claim an independent place’. Indeed, we are given several indications that Cliff does not understand the connection between entry and the united front policy at all. Speaking of Germany before the rise of Hitler, he asks himself, ‘how could 50 members of the Left Opposition in Berlin pressurise the KPD with its 34,000 members?’, as ‘the very existence of a small organisation calling for a united front seemed a contradiction in terms’ (p. 160). It might seem a contradiction in Cliff’s terms, but it was certainly not one in Trotsky’s, for in the very letter he quotes (Writings 1929, p. 337) Trotsky makes his meaning abundantly clear: ‘The Leninbund should feel and function like a faction within German Communism and not like an independent party.’ (original emphasis)
The same confusion applies to the transitional method and the founding of the Fourth International, which, as I have argued elsewhere (Workers News, October–November 1990), cannot be understood at all outside the context of the coming war. The proclamation of the International in 1938 is held to be a mistake (p306), for ‘under conditions of a massive expansion of capitalism, as took place after the Second World War’, the demands in its programme for a sliding scale of hours and wages ‘were at best meaningless, and at worst reactionary’, and ‘other demands in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, such as the establishment of “workers’ defence guards”, “workers’ militia”, and “the arming of the proletariat” certainly did not fit a non-revolutionary situation’ (p. 300). Exactly. For the Fourth International and the Transitional Programme were not founded for conditions of massive expansion of capitalism after the Second World War, but for the political crisis that would inevitably emerge towards the end of it. And dual power actually was posed at the time – in parts of Italy and France the Communist-dominated resistance actually did wield quasi-state functions until disarmed by Moscow’s directives, not to mention the civil wars that broke out in Yugoslavia and Greece during the war, or in Vietnam and China after the end of it. The fact that the Trotskyists were able to play so small a part in these events was only partly due to their tiny size, for an examination of their politics at the time shows that, like Tony Cliff, they had by then abandoned the transitional method (that is, assuming that they had ever understood it).
That brings us on to an interesting feature of this book, the light it casts on the postwar ideological confusion of the Trotskyist movement that gave rise to the Socialist Review Group, the ancestors of the modern SWP. For contrary to the legend spread by the late Gerry Healy of unblessed memory, and given credence by the majority of Trotskyists since, this group did not emerge out of a cowardly refusal to oppose the Korean War in 1950, but as a result of the inability of the Trotskyist movement to explain the expansion of Stalinist state forms in Eastern Europe after 1945. And the present book shows that Cliff still shares their logic:
If state property, planning, and a monopoly of foreign trade defined a country as a workers’ state, then without doubt Russia as well as her satellites were workers’ states. This presumes that proletarian revolutions had taken place in Eastern Europe.
But of course, it assumes nothing of the sort. What it shows is what Marxists have always understood about the outcome of a war between states of a different class character, that the victor imposes his class forms upon the vanquished by armed force. With regard to Russia this almost happened during the 1919–20 war with Poland, and actually did happen in the case of Georgia during Lenin’s lifetime.
Finally, a couple of minor points suggest that we are not too far off the mark in placing this book in the context of the particular needs of Cliff’s own organisation. One is the reference to the ‘squaddist practice’ of the German Red Front in its combats with the SA (p. 149). Another is the method by which quotations are made. For example, the only references to the work of this magazine are to an article written in it by one of Cliff’s own comrades (p. 405). Oskar Hippe’s autobiography is quoted from the German (p. 397), with no indication that an English translation put out by a rival organisation exists at all. Citations are made from sections of the German of Wolfgang Alles’ book (pp. 145, 154), which we published long ago in English in this magazine (Volume 2, no. 3, Autumn 1989, pp. 29–30), and Pierre Broué‘s views on the German left which were published in full in the same issue are even quoted second-hand from a German book by another author (p. 150). This suggests that Comrade Cliff is by no means happy with his members following up his references by reading more widely in the contributions of others. The same unpleasant trait is shared by some of his followers, for example, when a reference is made to the same article by Andy Durgan cited by Cliff without even mentioning the name of the magazine of which it forms part (International Socialism, no. 62, Spring 1994, p. 88, n8). I hope that this does not indicate that the SWP is trying to step into the CPGB’s shoes in their less attractive fittings, though to be fair to them we must point out that this habit is not to be found among some other leading members, such as Alex Callinicos.Saying this, of course, does not detract from the book’s value otherwise. Whilst less detailed and less well researched than Broué’s biography, it does allow Trotsky to emerge as a political figure in a clear and coherent fashion, even if his personal fortunes tend to fade into the background a bit. It is a real contribution to the political debate about Trotsky, now that so much more material is becoming available. And the reader would have to range over a very wide field indeed to encounter the material collected together and arranged so well here.
Al Richardson
**********
Review
The War on Labor and the Left
Patricia Cayo Sexton
The War on Labor and the Left
Westview, Oxford 1993, pp. 326, £11.95
The War on Labor and the Left
Westview, Oxford 1993, pp. 326, £11.95
THE United States of America is now, and has been through the whole of the twentieth century, the most powerful capitalist nation on the face of the globe. Yet the US trade union movement is in relative terms amongst the weakest of any advanced industrial state. Furthermore, the political system is dominated by what all agree are two equally bourgeois parties, and there exists no mass labour or Socialist movement at all. These facts pose a conundrum which has puzzled Socialists at home and abroad for a full two generations. Patricia Cayo Sexton, herself a one-time trade union activist, the daughter of a Detroit-based middle ranking official of the million-plus-strong auto workers’ union, the UAW, has written a splendid book which goes far towards providing an answer.
Socialism, however, has not always been at a discount in the USA. Eugene Debs’ The Appeal to Reason sold more than a million copies a week in the years before the First World War. At its peak in 1912, the Socialist Party of the USA organised 118,000 individual members, published no less than 323 different publications with a combined readership of over two million, polled 900,000 votes in that year’s Presidential election, and elected 1,200 office holders in 340 cities, including 79 mayors in 24 states. Morris Hillquit ran for Mayor of New York on an anti-war platform in August 1918, called for a negotiated peace, and polled 146,000 votes.The Socialist Party’s unhesitating opposition to the USA’s entry into the war in 1917 brought down on its head a torrent of repression, far greater than that visited on Socialists in any other country during the First World War; Britain, France, Germany and Tsarist Russia included. A total of 2,100 people were arrested and indicted for opposing the war, and over 1,000 convicted, with over 100 of them receiving prison terms of 10 years or more. Debs, the 64 year old party leader, was sentenced in 1918 to 10 years in jail, and was not released until 1921, long after the war was over. In Britain, conscientious objectors did not receive sentences exceeding two years, whilst in the USA, 17 COs were sentenced to death, 142 to life in prison, and 345 to prison terms that averaged 16 years.
The wave of state-sponsored terror that descended upon America’s Socialists in the war and the immediate postwar years, not least in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, was one major cause of the Socialist Party’s subsequent long-term near terminal decline. Another, which to my mind the author greatly underestimates, is the havoc wreaked by the rabid civil war loosed in the ranks of the battered Socialist Party by the Comintern-inspired split, which was liberally funded by Russia and often deepened by police spies, and which led to the emergence of the Communist Party of the USA.
The USA from its inception has always been a violent society, not merely at the ‘Frontier’ in the ‘West’, but also in the interior in the ‘East’ behind the lines. The interior still remains violent today, where the rates for murder and rape and the proportion of the population in prison are the highest in the world.
In much the same way, Sexton argues that the class struggle in the USA has been from the very beginning harder fought, more brutal and more violent than in Britain and Europe. In Europe, as I document in my The Labour Movement in Europe (London 1975), even at its peak the bourgeoisie never held the state power and the judiciary in its hands alone. That power had to be shared with the remnants of the landed aristocracy, the church hierarchy, and other social elements which pre-dated the bourgeoisie on the social scene.
No such dichotomy existed in the USA. There was from the very beginning no feudal aristocracy holding all the land in a kind of monopolistic seigniorial tenure, nor, since the constitution laid down that there was to be no established religion, no theological cult of any variety exercising massive social, political and propaganda power in its own right. In these circumstances, US business exercised a predominance in the making, application and interpretation of the legal code that was quite unprecedented elsewhere. ‘In the United States’, Sexton writes, ‘employers were often not merely above the law, they were the law.‘ (p. 66) Employers in the USA have all along exercised far more direct power over the President, House and Senate, the police and the judiciary in the 50-odd states than the bourgeoisie has ever exercised in Europe over comparable governmental institutions. In a nation without any BBC, with a radio and television network entirely at the mercy of commercial capitalist advertisers, in which election broadcasts are not free, but must be paid for in millions of dollars, the domination of capitalist ideology reigns quite unchallenged. Such news as appears is trivialised and biased in the extreme. National newspapers in the main do not exist. Newspaper readership is far lower than in the UK, the level of reporting is far lower, and the diversity of opinion expressed is far more closely monitored by the media monopolies in the USA than in the UK. Through most of American history, the law courts have been quite remarkably hostile to labour, with the widespread use of the injunction hog-tying labour through most of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The organisation of mass production industry in the 1930s would have quite impossible without the election of Roosevelt as President, and the subsequent enactment of the Wagner Act and the National Labour Relations Act, which briefly tipped the balance of the law in labour’s favour. The subsequent enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act tipped the balance sharply back in favour of the employers, where it still remains. In short, labour in the USA has been forced to struggle far harder than its counterparts in Europe, only in the end to gain far less. This is an original thesis, one which Sexton documents with much detail drawn from the history of the USA over the past 200 years. The data, with which I am familiar, is in the main incontrovertible. The use which Sexton makes of the material is entirely legitimate, and to myself quite convincing.
As Sexton does not fail to point out, there are, however, a number of other exceptional features which characterised the US experience. These can be briefly listed. There is the absence in the USA of any feudal aristocracy, with the consequent easy access of the masses to universal suffrage, quite without hard-fought struggles, which was close to unique. There is the open democratic character of the US constitution, with its intricate set of checks and balances between the House of Representatives, the Senate, the President and the judiciary, and its federal character, with many important powers resting with the states and not with the federal government at all. There were also the existence through most of the twentieth century of ‘free land’ on an ‘Open Frontier’ in the ‘West’, which allegedly provided a safety valve for discontented workers in the ‘East’; and the 40 million ethnically diverse emigrants who crossed the Atlantic from Europe to the USA between 1870 and 1915, and who constituted a virtual reserve army of labour pressing down on native working-class militancy; there was also the legacy of slavery, with the resultant racist attitudes which were prone to split white and black labour into discrete and hostile groups. Finally, the very vastness of the territories of the USA made it difficult or next to impossible to build up truly national forms of working-class and Socialist organisation. Such factors Sexton freely concedes to be important. Yet they remain in her view quite insufficient to provide a global explanation of the weakness of American labour.
The extent of the war on labour and the left waged by US employers against US employees is documented at great length, and the reader will need to go to the account of particular strikes and confrontations to get the full sense of the matter. A few details concerning the casualty lists will serve to make the matter plain. In the seven years of 1890–97 an estimated 92 people were killed in major strikes, and from January 1902 to September 1904 an estimated 198 people were killed and 1,966 wounded. Over the years 1877–1968 state and federal troops intervened in labour disputes, almost invariably on behalf of the employers, on more than 160 occasions. Overall, a check of strike casualties actually reported in the national press over these same years gives a total of 700 dead and thousands more injured.
More recently, violence has declined, but some 29 people were nonetheless killed in major strikes between 1947 and 1962. By comparison, if the figure quoted by Sexton is correct, in the United Kingdom only one person has been killed in a strike since 1911. The trade union movement, in proportional terms, is far stronger even now in the UK than it has ever been in the USA. But if British unions had faced the same level of employer and state oppression as their counterparts in the USA, would they be at all as strong as they are today? One very much doubts it.
It has long been customary for para-Marxoid left-wingers in the UK, to say nothing of whole rafts of alienated left-wing middle-class intellectuals in the USA, to look with contempt upon the US unions as being led by corrupt, bureaucratic, class collaborationist ‘labour lieutenants of capital’, and their members as reactionary and racist to a man. The truly kaleidoscopic variety of US labour has thus been subsumed into some stylised stereotype based on Hoffa, the Teamsters and the Mafia, which, if the truth be told, are themselves quite alien to the reality of Hoffa himself and that of the Teamsters, and even less applicable to other unions, the wider ranks of the AFL-CIO as a whole. This hackneyed notion of a bought-over ‘labour aristocracy’, led by a corrupt and self-serving class collaborationist bureaucracy, was always too simple, and always in danger of being gravely misleading. Now that The War on Labor and the Left has appeared and dealt with these matters more thoroughly, one would like to think that we will here no more of this nonsense again.
Walter Kendall
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Review
The Khrushchev Era
Donald Filtzer
The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinisation and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953–1964
MacMillan, Basingstoke 1993, pp. 92, £5.95
The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinisation and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953–1964
MacMillan, Basingstoke 1993, pp. 92, £5.95
THIS book is in MacMillan’s Studies in European History series, and is the third dealing with the Soviet Union (the others are Robert Service’s The Russian Revolution 1900–1927, and Graeme Gill’s Stalinism). These books are intended for sixth form and BA students, and consist of around 80 pages of text which give a general outline of the subject, plus references to a range of books and articles, to which the reader is pointed for further study. Donald Filtzer has written two pioneering studies of the Soviet working class (Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation and Soviet Workers and De-Stalinisation), edited a selection of Preobrazhensky’s writings, and published an excellent article on him in Critique (no. 9, 1978).
The Khrushchev Era gives a succinct but comprehensive account of Khrushchev’s years in power. Filtzer looks at the changes that occurred in the Communist Party, government, industry, agriculture, social policies and foreign policy, describing why they were introduced, and what they actually achieved. Stalin’s successors were obliged to set about reforming a society in a state of deep crisis. They recognised, however, that there were limits to that process, and that going too far would put the system and therefore their rule in jeopardy. This was shown in the limitations of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956, which was due to the need to criticise Stalin but not the Stalinist system: ‘The monarch had to be discredited, but without discrediting the line of succession.’ (p. 20)Filtzer explains why Khrushchev’s measures were largely unsuccessful, and often proved unpopular. Many of his attempts to improve ministerial efficiency led to a form of decentralisation that merely replicated the bureaucratic system at a regional level, and did not lead to an improvement in industrial and agricultural efficiency. Soviet bureaucrats resented the disruption caused by the ministerial reforms. Industry could not provide sufficient machinery to implement the expansion of agriculture, and food shortages led to price rises and working-class resistance, which, in the case of Novocherkassk, was brutally suppressed. The intelligentsia resented the expansion of further education, which was seen as a threat to its privileges. The immediate results of de-Stalinisation in Eastern Europe, most vividly expressed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, made the Soviet bureaucracy as a whole very wary, and explains why Khrushchev himself veered between liberalisation and repression.
Filtzer sees two factors behind Khrushchev’s downfall. Firstly, Soviet bureaucrats as individuals and as a social group resented the disruptive consequences of his reforms. Secondly, they recognised that the reforms had in fact led to more difficulties in industry and agriculture. This leads Filtzer on to a more profound question – the basically irreformable nature of the Soviet socio-economic system. He shows that disorganisation, material and labour shortages, waste, defective produce and poor distribution were essential features of Soviet-style ‘planning’. Furthermore, because ‘ordinary people in both town and countryside were excluded from any say in how society was to be run’, workers ‘played a large part in causing, or at least perpetuating, such disruptions’ (pp. 70–1). The perpetual labour shortage led to workers being able to defend themselves by forcing enterprise managements to accept poor discipline and shoddy work. Khrushchev was unable to overcome these problems (indeed, his reforms often exacerbated them) because they were immanent to the socio-economic formation constructed under Stalin from the late 1920s, and could not be overcome short of overturning that system, a step Khrushchev was not willing to take.
That being the case, it is strange that Filtzer, in framing his discussion of Khrushchev within a comparison with the final Soviet reformer, Gorbachev, does not investigate why, if Khrushchev and his ‘hare-brained’ schemes were thrown out, Gorbachev was allowed to carry on, despite the fact that his reforms, once they assumed a market orientation, would evidently lead to the demise of the Soviet system. Despite the problems which Khrushchev was trying to address, the Soviet economy was still expanding at the time of his dismissal by around six per cent per annum, and the Soviet bureaucracy could afford to adopt less risky policies. The bureaucracy did not have this luxury by the 1980s, when growth had practically stopped. Gorbachev’s reforms had to continue, whatever the results. The bureaucracy knew that its system had reached the end of the road, and by the late 1980s it recognised that its only hope for survival was through a return to capitalism.
Nevertheless, despite this omission, readers of this journal who are studying Soviet history, or who are teaching such courses, will find this book a good introductory and guide for further study for themselves or their students.
Paul Flewers
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Review
Politics, Logic and Love
Anita Burdman Feferman
Politics, Logic and Love: The Life of Jean Van Heijenoort
AK Peters, Wellesly 1993, pp. 415, £29.95
Politics, Logic and Love: The Life of Jean Van Heijenoort
AK Peters, Wellesly 1993, pp. 415, £29.95
THIS is a book about a most complex and interesting man, who for some years played a central role in the Trotskyist movement, and yet it somehow manages to avoid the point, written as it is in the language of sub-Freudian popular psychology, in which father figures, guilt complexes and love triangles float back and forth, skilfully washing the politics off the page. Thus Trotsky was a ‘prima donna’ (p. 143) and Van Heijenoort ‘would complain with a certain bitterness that the Old Man did not care deeply about him personally’ (pp. 133–4), but when he accepts Trotsky’s arguments ‘an emptiness was filled and a father resurrected’ (p. 117). And again: ‘Although the Gaby-Van-Trotsky triangle was somewhat different from the situation between Jeanne, Lyova and Raymond, the passions and tensions surrounding their entanglements were very much the same’ (p. 115). ‘It is difficult to resist the thought that when Comrade Gaby spoke with the voice of those who differed with Trotsky, at least some part of what moved her was personal’, she writes (p. 106). It certainly is difficult for the writer to resist such thoughts, but after the reader has encountered them page after page he begins to wish that she had.
Without such self-indulgence we might have learned a little more about the man and his ideas as opposed to her own, for a mass of personal ephemera crowds in, effectively obscuring them. We are told about the soup he drank in the Collège de Clermont, but not the name of the young man who first recruited him to Trotskyism (p. 39). Less effort than we could have hoped is invested into understanding the nature of the movement to which Van Heijenoort belonged, described as ‘serious young people with Marxist-utopian ideals’ (p54), whose ‘passions ran high in the name of “isms” but bubbling and boiling beneath the surface were the ordinary human passions, the love triangles and the personality conflicts that added fuel to the fire’ (p. 117).Certainly political analysis is not her strong point, for she believes that among ‘the dreams the Trotskyists hoped to activate’ were that ‘someone might assassinate Stalin’ (p. 86), and that Trotsky and his French supporters ‘decided to call themselves the Fourth International’ in 1933 (p. 112, a mistake repeated on pages 93 and 123). It is treated as a great revelation that when he was International Secretary Van Heijenoort used US sailors as couriers abroad (p. 189), a fact that has appeared in several books by now and has been open knowledge for many years. Quite unaware of the scope and outcome of the conflict inside the US Socialist Workers Party over the ending of the Second World War, she even takes as good coin Van Heijenoort’s alibi when leaving the movement that his first doubts about Marxism came from the flaws in Engels’ mathematics in Anti-Dühring (p. 215).
However, there are indications that this superficiality is not wholly to be blamed upon the writer, for by the time she interviewed Van Heijenoort a lifetime of mathematical logic had destroyed his grasp of the political and dialectical sort, even to the extent of his no longer understanding such kindergarten Marxist propositions as the role of the individual in history and the critique of individual terrorism. Thus, speaking of the monstrous accusations made in the Moscow Trials, Feferman notes that ‘what is most interesting in this connection is that Van faulted Trotsky and his followers for having done too little in the way of conspiracy’ (p. 142):
Why wouldn’t Trotsky, the ex-Commissar for War, have plotted a return? Why wouldn’t there have been many plots against Stalin by those who, early on, were keenly and painfully aware of his diabolical cruelty and single-mindedness?
Fifty years after the Moscow Trials, Van Heijenoort’s response to such a question was an excited and emphatic: ‘… it would have made sense to kill Stalin personally. But Trotsky always said “We are against personal terrorism.” Of course Stalin should have been eliminated.’ (p. 140)
But we must not assume from this that the book does not contain material of considerable value, some of it quite disturbing. An authentic note is struck when Feferman comments upon Van Heijenoort’s activity as Secretary of the Fourth International during the War:
His concerns were global, whereas those of the Socialist Workers [Party], in his opinion, were narrow and parochial … Since he had no financial support for his projects, he was in the demeaning position of having to swallow his anger and ask for aid from an unsympathetic boss. Describing his situation later, he said: “I would go to Cannon and plead for money to buy the stamps and stationery necessary to maintain my contacts abroad … Grudgingly, Cannon doled out small amounts of cash.” (pp. 186–7)
The disturbing material towards the end concerns his collaboration with the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, the extent of which only became known when his file was declassified in 1988. It transpires that J. Edgar Hoover ordered him to be investigated as early as August 1942, and that when he was interviewed ‘by 1948’ he ‘agreed to tell them what he knew’, which ‘seems to have been one of the factors that finally opened the door to citizenship’ (pp. 230–4). Although it is implied that this full cooperation only took place after he left the movement, I for one remain unconvinced, for it is obvious that his ostensible break with the movement over Engels’ faulty mathematics conceals a rationalisation for something else.
Whatever the truth of the matter, all who take a serious interest in the history of Trotskyism must attempt an assessment of the career of this brilliant if somewhat narcissistic figure, a flawed genius if ever there was one, for which the account in this book is indispensable.
Al Richardson
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Review
Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal
Klaus Gietinger
Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal: Die Ermordung der Rosa L
Decaton Verlag, Mainz 1993, pp. 109, DM 14
Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal: Die Ermordung der Rosa L
Decaton Verlag, Mainz 1993, pp. 109, DM 14
IN January 1989 Süddeutsche Rundfunk, a West German television station, showed Dieter Ertel’s TV drama from 1969 about the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, in spite of a court ruling of 1971 prohibiting it. Fascinated by the drama and the story of its prohibition, scriptwriter, director and producer Klaus Gietinger set out to write his own drama.
His research led him to uncover the murderers and how the deeds were done, as well as how it was possible to obscure it all, and who was ultimately responsible. His efforts are documented in an impressive set of notes taking up a third of this book – the title translating as A Corpse in the Landwehr Canal: The Murder of Rosa L – where the protagonists are briefly detailed. In the case of the murderers, their unsavoury deeds in the Weimar Republic and their fortunes in the Third Reich are recorded. In some key cases, the survivors were able to fill in the gaps in the story.Gietinger operated like a detective, checking earlier trials, accounts, and the press and literature covering the events, and his story unfolds in a gripping manner as he follows different leads. But this is not fiction. He was able to see archives previously closed to researchers, and material from the murderers known only to a few people.
Having sorted out how the deeds were done, and how it was possible to avoid finding the culprits, Gietinger found that times had changed since Ertel’s drama was commissioned and produced, and that TV companies were not interested in putting out his work. He therefore sent his findings in the form of an historical essay to the respected journal of labour movement history, Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, in which it appeared in 1992 (Volume 28, nos. 3 and 4). The Decaton edition is partially rewritten and a bit shorter.
The court martial of the suspected murderers in May 1919 is described by Gietinger as ‘one of the most shamelessly untruthful trials in German legal history’ (p. 31), and whilst reading it I was reminded of the Stalker affair and the supposed ‘shoot to kill’ tactic. By not asking the right questions to the right people, by conspiring to obscure who did what, by an assortment of tricks, and in this case by getting the right judges and prosecutor, it was easy to scapegoat a few minor figures, and to let those in charge get off.
It would spoil the story if I were to name names and give the game away, so I will restrict myself to revealing that Gustav Noske gave a nod and a wink, but nothing in writing, for the murders. There is no evidence that any other leading Social Democrats were involved. One can hold against them their timidity in dealing with the military, and in particular their ignoring of popular pressure for a proper civil trial, and their failure to campaign for a new trial after the court martial had been discredited. In the postwar period, the SPD has continued this shameful policy by upholding the discredited 1919 verdict. This has prevented the true facts from coming to light, and was used in the case against Ertel.
Surely the continued interest in the personality, ideas and deeds of Luxemburg, and the attraction of her and Liebknecht, both heroic giants of the international labour movement, will lead to an English language edition of Gietinger’s book being produced. I hope that somebody will get together with him to put on his drama. It would make a great film.
Mike Jones
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Ian Birchall
Heretics in Communism
(Autumn 1994)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 5 No. 3, Autumn 1994, pp. 255–6.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Theodor Bergmann and Mario Kessler (eds.)
Ketzer im Kommunismus: Alternativen zum Stalinismus
Decaton Verlag, Mainz 1993, pp. 383, DM 48
Ketzer im Kommunismus: Alternativen zum Stalinismus
Decaton Verlag, Mainz 1993, pp. 383, DM 48
AFTER the collapse of Stalinism, the task of rebuilding a healthy Socialist tradition requires a critical assessment of the history of the movement, in particular of the various thinkers and currents that opposed Stalinism during its long period of dominance. As a contribution to this task, Bergmann and Kessler have edited a collection of 20 essays dealing with what they call ‘heretics in Communism’.
The editors have cast their net wide. Beginning with Luxemburg and Trotsky, they include not only oppositional figures such as Nin and Trotsky, but also ‘alternative’ currents within the bureaucracy itself, such as Khrushchev and Liu Shao-chi. The story ends with the Czech Communist Party and Gorbachev.The book contains much valuable documentation. Whilst in general, the various authors are sympathetic to their chosen subjects, there is little hero-worship, and always a balanced attempt to assess weaknesses as well as qualities. But since the contributors subscribe to no common analysis, the whole question of ‘alternatives to Stalinism’ broached in the book’s title is left somewhat in the air. For some contributors, it is simply a question of alternative policies that might have been adopted by Stalin – or Mao or Dubcek – had they been a little wiser, or a little more humane. For others, Stalinism seems to be implied in the whole Bolshevik enterprise, and hence we have to start again, although no one seems quite sure from where (the final essay on Gorbachev ends with the words ‘On the road again’, but Canned Heat lyrics are scarcely likely to be the source of Marxist renewal). As a result, the book can be seen as no more than a collection of useful but unprocessed raw material.
Part of the problem is the varied nature of the figures dealt with. The opening chapters, on Luxemburg and Trotsky, add little new, but they do make it clear that for these Marxists, Socialism was to be defined by the self-emancipation of the working class, and that this was the criterion by which any alleged ‘workers’ state’ was to be judged. Tito’s revolt against the Kremlin and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech are significant historical events deserving of critical appraisal, but their protagonists had scant interest in workers’ self-emancipation, as the murdered Belgrade Trotskyists and the workers of Budapest could have testified.
It is also striking that in the broad range of ‘heretics’ treated, there is not one who developed any serious analysis of Stalinist society in terms of a form of class rule. There is no Serge, no Shachtman, no James, no Djilas, no Cliff, no Kuron and Modzelewski. Apparently, some heretics are too heretical.
But if the book as a whole fails to deliver its promise, many of its parts are of considerable value. All but the most erudite will have something to learn from the essays on Thalheimer, Arthur Rosenberg, M.N. Riutin (whose anti-Stalinist document of 1932 is reproduced), M.N. Roy and Robert Havemann. Whilst at first sight Frantz Fanon might seem out of place in such a collection, Hansen and Schulz make a good case for his work as an important contribution to Socialist thinking, fashioned in opposition to the betrayals of the French Communist Party. Fanon was not a black nationalist, and he stressed the role of European allies in the Algerian liberation struggle; he rejected Russian ‘state capitalism’ as a model for Third World development, and he had interesting views on the relationship of party and class. Now that the post-cooption of Fanon as a ‘Third Worldist’ is more or less dead, it may be time to look again at this important thinker.
Jones and Mitchell attempt to make out a case for Isaac Deutscher as the most important Marxist thinker of the postwar period. Deutscher’s historical skill and his great influence on those of us who came to Trotskyism in the 1950s and 1960s are unquestionable. But although the authors are scrupulous in recognising that Deutscher grossly overestimated the progressive nature of the Soviet economy (a four-hour working day by 1984), they still fail to make their case because of certain problems shared by most of the contributors to this volume. Firstly, they claim that had Deutscher lived to see the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he might have revised his optimistic hopes in the Eastern regimes’ capacity for self-reform. But on their own evidence, he could not have done so without abandoning his entire theoretical structure. Secondly, they commend Deutscher for his opposition to Trotsky’s founding of the Fourth International. Now Deutscher may well have been right that it was the wrong time to found a democratic centralist International. But the more profound difference was between Trotsky’s persistent determination to preserve an organisation, and Deutscher’s retreat into the ‘watchtower’. In a sense, Deutscher sums up the problem with this volume – most of its subjects either tried to reform the bureaucracy from within, or criticised from without from a position of isolation. Neither offers a way forward for Socialists today.
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Review
Bukharin
Wladislaw Hedeler and Ruth Stoljarowa
Nikolai Bucharin, Leben und Werk
Decaton Verlag, Mainz 1993, pp. 160, DM 24
Nikolai Bucharin, Leben und Werk
Decaton Verlag, Mainz 1993, pp. 160, DM 24
HEDELER and Stoljarowa’s book is a strangely passionless treatment of Bukharin’s life and work. This surprising, because whilst he was alive, Bukharin was surrounded by controversy. He was a revolutionary leader, who, as a Left Communist, aroused furious debate over the nature of the state, imperialism and the immediate tasks of the 1917 Revolution. Later on he was an outspoken supporter of War Communism. By the mid-1920s his was the most articulate supporter of a market orientation and Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’. He may have been ‘the darling of the party’, to use Lenin’s phrase, but this did not blunt the sharpness of criticism directed against him, or by him against others. Bukharin fell from political influence in 1929, but returned to prominence as the key defendant in the last of the great purge trials of the 1930s.
Although out of the limelight for 50 years, Bukharin received renewed interest after the publication of a major biography by Stephen Cohen. Then, in the mid-1980s, as the USSR began moving towards market structures, Gorbachev adopted what were described as ‘Bukharinist’ policies. Thus, in the recent period Bukharin’s work has become a battleground for those who would coopt him to the cause of market Socialism, those who believe he was a right-wing deviationist portrayed by Stalin, and yet others who wish to rescue elements of his work (in particular his analysis of imperialism and the state) from the general mêlée.This book certainly has merits. It makes use of the most up-to-date material released from the Russian archives, and gives extensive coverage to two relatively neglected periods of Bukharin’s life, his early years and the last years of his life.
The coverage of the formative period of Bukharin’s political career is useful in filling gaps in our knowledge of his activity in Moscow. In addition, there is a valuable analysis of the influence on Bukharin of Alexander Bogdanov, the empirio-monist philosopher, and of David Riazanov, the Marx expert who has not been noted till now as having played such a role with Bukharin. The emphasis in the book on Bukharin’s philosophy is a valuable corrective to Cohen’s biography, which dismisses his philosophy as unimportant.
Bukharin’s later years have also been often overlooked, for an obvious reason. During that time the weight of Stalinist repression meant that Bukharin was not able to speak freely, and therefore much of what he said and wrote cannot be treated as a true expression of the man. However, Hedeler and Stoljarowa are able to tease out developments in his later thinking on philosophy and culture, as well as giving a comprehensive account of the circumstances leading up to his trial and execution in 1938.
Nevertheless, the treatment of Bukharin’s life and work is altogether too disengaged. This is meant in a double sense: disengaged from its social context, and disengaged from political debate. There is no sense of the fantastic twists and turns in events – revolution, civil war, the New Economic Policy, collectivisation and so on, which moulded Bukharin, and which, through his activity, moulded leading circles of the party.
It is true to say that in the book Bukharin’s enthusiastic and yet mistaken belief in the compatibility of the market and Socialist society is treated with mild sympathy, but this is the closest we get to a sense of the current debates. Now, objectivity and clear-thinking analysis are, of course, desirable things. But unless there is a sense of direction or purpose in a work, it remains dry and lifeless. A sign of this in the book is the fact that the selection of material seems to have been an arbitrary process without a firm rationale.
On the cover of the book Hedeler and Stoljarowa write that they wish to rescue Bukharin ‘from the warehouse of the revolutionary museum’ into which he has recently been returned after his brief airing in the late 1980s. I agree. But after reading this book, it is not clear why he should be rescued.
The two authors come from the East German historical tradition. It may be the case that they represent a current of academic writers and historians who are seeking a new revolutionary politics in the post-unified Germany. If so, such politics will not come from simply noting what Bukharin has to say, but from a sharp analysis. Socialists today should be highly critical of his 1920s writings on the market, whilst recognising the theoretical contribution he made to understanding modern capitalism.
This may be a contentious polemical point. But as Bukharin was someone who grew up in the Bolshevik tradition, and who, however erroneous his subsequent path, died believing in it, such a polemic is the least he would have expected and deserved.
Donny Gluckstein
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Review
C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism
Scott McLemee and Paul LeBlanc (eds.),
C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James, 1939–1949
Humanities Press, New Jersey 1994, pp. 252
C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James, 1939–1949
Humanities Press, New Jersey 1994, pp. 252
THE appearance of any collection of the essays of C.L.R. James is certainly an event to be celebrated, and James enthusiasts are in for a feast with this one. For the quality of his contributions is quite extraordinary, and only the review of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station does less than justice to that classic work. His mastery is all the more obvious when amusing attempts are made in some of the introductory essays to prove that he was one of the ‘soft Marxists … very much in the tradition of Raymond Williams, John Berger, and E.P. Thompson’ (pp. 53–4), or that ‘the New Left, the women’s movement, and above all the black movement seemed at points to be expressing in political logic the insightful kernel James had opened up in his venture beyond orthodox Leninism’ (p. 70). But as his most outstanding interpreter Paul Buhle points out, James ‘has been almost entirely outside what Perry Anderson has called “Western Marxism”, the drift of Marxist theory from the revolutionary parties to the academies between the 1920s and today’ (p. 55). For time and again James shows that he soars above those who would read their own thoughts into his, and make a harmless icon of him. Thus, unlike all too many soi-disant Marxists these days, ‘when challenged, he continued to insist on the primacy of the working class in the struggle for Socialism’ (p. 52), and as for abandoning the proletariat to sow illusions in Third World nationalism, ‘to those who, having for years accepted it, are now determined to depart from it, we are enemies, outspoken and relentless’ (p. 18). And despite Paul LeBlanc’s contention that George Breitman’s theories of black separatism ‘would have been impossible without the kind of analysis pioneered by James 25 years before’ (p. 6), James’ essay The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States (pp. 179–87) shows that, along with Trotsky, he was a resolute opponent of such nonsense. And here he is in good company with Lenin, for as Paul Buhle again remarks, it was ‘a fundamental breach of Leninist (or even Second International) discipline’ (p. 63) to talk of any such liberation outside the struggle of the working class.
My only misgiving about this book (admittedly, a minor one) would be that although it claims to be ‘a concentrated selection of writings from his “Trotskyist” period in the 1930s and 1940s’ (p. 20), it is in fact taken wholly from his output whilst he was in the United States, when he was already moving away from Trotskyism. We are therefore prevented from studying the development of his thought from its more conventionally Trotskyist basis whilst he lived in Britain. Let us hope that the same editors will bring out another book of his articles from that time, for only by placing the American period of his life in context can we hope to grasp the direction of his thinking, and the scope of his insights.Certainly American scholarship about James neglects quite markedly the influence of the thought of the non-Trotskyist left that had already brought him into conflict with the International Secretariat by 1936. The originality of World Revolution, for example, is put down to the fact that he ‘came to the Trotskyist movement very much as an independent thinker, with a substantial store of previous knowledge and insights’ (p. 3), as opposed to the evidence of the internal documents of the time, which show that he was already influenced by the ideas of Boris Souvarine, Henri Chazé, Hugo Oehler, Albert Weisbord, etc. For example, without an acquaintance with the theories of the Union Communiste led by Chazé (Gaston Davoust), it would be impossible to understand why James accepted a ‘state capitalist’ theory of the degeneration of the Soviet Union during the split of 1939–40, as opposed to Max Shachtman’s ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ (p. 7). For we are repeatedly told that James went to the United States ‘for a lecture tour’ (p. 212) ‘at least in part to organise the Trotskyists’ work among African Americans’ (p. 219), which is only partly true, for it is quite plain that he was encouraged to go to remove him as an opponent of the leadership of the newly-united British section of the Fourth International, with whom he had been in political conflict since 1935, and that this was a Comintern-style exercise in ‘straightening him out’ (cf. Harry Wicks, Keeping My Head, pp. 181–2; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International, p. 24). His supporters among the British Trotskyists, such as Bill Duncan and Harry Wicks, resented it for years afterwards.
This failure to identify important factors in James’ development may lie in the general lack of grasp of the intricacies of Trotskyist history, which (apart from the treatment in Charlie Van Gelderen’s excellent contribution) is the weakest part of the book. James’ ‘confident assumption that “Pablo has captured Cannon politically” proved to be short sighted’, notes LeBlanc (p. 14), whose own hindsight obviously does not extend as far as Cannon’s cult of Castro’s Cuba. We do not need to look too far for the reasons for this, for when LeBlanc cites his sources for the history of the Trotskyist movement (p. 28, n4) they turn out to be exclusively runners from the stable of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the sole exception being Robert J. Alexander’s book, which is heavily dependent upon the information they provided for him.
But don’t let this put you off this superb book: buy one yourself, and another for a friend.
Al Richardson
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